📣 Chime Eyes IPO: Fintech Caught Between Fees and Lending
Chime, the U.S. neobank catering to low-to-moderate income users, is preparing to go public—potentially at a valuation between $8B and $9B. That’s below its last secondary valuation of $10B as of early May 2025.
The company straddles two fintech models: interchange-fee revenue (like Wise or Remitly) and consumer lending (like Affirm or Dave). About 75% of Chime’s $519M in Q1 2025 revenue came from merchant-paid card transaction fees. But its lending product, MyPay—which offers small paycheck advances—is growing faster and now accounts for 12% of revenue.
Chime generated $1.7B in revenue in 2024, up 31% year-over-year, and is now tracking toward a $2B+ run rate based on early 2025 results. Impressively, 67% of its 8.6M users treat Chime as their primary financial account.
Valuation comps tell a wide-ranging story:

• On Affirm’s 13x forward gross profit multiple: Chime could be worth $21B.
• On Dave’s 8x: closer to $12B.
• On Remitly’s 3.8x: around $6B.

The IPO pitch hinges on whether Chime’s fee-driven growth can hold amid a softening credit cycle—and whether lending can scale without adding risk. Chime is near cash flow positive, and with fresh capital, may weather macro turbulence—but investors will be watching its growth curve closely.

🤝 Microsoft Taps Anthropic to Boost GitHub Copilot
Microsoft is partnering with Anthropic to integrate its Claude 4 model into GitHub Copilot, signaling a willingness to diversify beyond OpenAI—despite its $13B investment and exclusive product rights there.
The Claude integration will power new AI agent capabilities, including features like:

• Monitoring websites for outages and self-healing them
• Automatically rewriting code across different programming languages

The move shows Microsoft’s commitment to a multi-model AI strategy, especially as agentic workflows become core to productivity tooling.

💵 Circle Draws $5B+ Buyout Interest After IPO Filing
Just weeks after filing for an IPO, Circle—issuer of the USDC stablecoin—is reportedly in acquisition talks valuing it north of $5 billion. Ripple and Coinbase are among the players eyeing deeper moves into the stablecoin space.
Circle’s revenue grew 15.6% in 2024, a slowdown from the 88% surge in 2023, when rising interest rates boosted its reserve income. The company’s rate of return on reserves climbed from 1.5% in 2022 to 5.0% in 2024, reflecting its bank-like model: Circle earns yield on assets backing its USDC supply.
But growth came at a cost. Despite revenue gains, net income fell 42% last year, as distribution and transaction expenses jumped nearly 40%—outpacing topline growth.
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🤖 xAI Invests $300M in Telegram, Embeds Grok Chatbot**
xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, is investing $300 million in cash and equity into Telegram, the popular messaging platform. As part of the deal, Grok, xAI’s chatbot, will be integrated across Telegram’s app ecosystem for one year.
Telegram will take a 50% cut of subscription revenue generated by Grok users who sign up through its platform. The move gives xAI a massive distribution boost while offering Telegram a new monetization stream beyond ads and premium subscriptions.

🌍 Global AI, Fintech, and IPO Activity Roundup
**Mistral AI **× Nvidia are forming a joint venture to launch an AI campus in Paris, signaling Nvidia’s push for sovereign AI partnerships and Europe’s growing ambition to lead in the space.

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface startup, raised $600M at a $9B valuation, per Semafor. The company recently implanted its third chip in a man with ALS.

Hex, which builds AI-powered data analytics tools, raised $70M in Series C. Backers include Avra (lead), a16z, Sequoia, Redpoint, Snowflake Ventures, and others.

Shein is reportedly considering shifting its IPO plans from London to Hong Kong, amid delays in Chinese regulatory approvals. The company previously scrapped a U.S. listing.

Klarna is now expected to delay its IPO to fall 2025, citing ongoing market uncertainty, per Swedish outlet Realtid.

Monzo has hired Morgan Stanley to pitch investors ahead of a potential IPO in H1 2026.

🌍 Launchbay Report: Non-U.S. Secondaries on the Rise
Launchbay has released a new report, "Beyond Silicon Valley: The Rise of Non-U.S. Venture Secondaries," spotlighting the growing global share of secondary market activity.
Over the past few quarters, non-U.S. secondaries have accounted for 14% to 25% of total market volume, with countries like the UK, China, Canada, Sweden, and Australia emerging as key hubs. Unlike the U.S. market, which is heavily concentrated in AI, these regions show sectoral specialization—from digital banking in the UK to SaaS in Australia.
The report also identifies the “Non-U.S. Magnificent 7”—Bytedance, Revolut, Klarna, Monzo, Cohere, Airwallex, and Canva—as leading liquidity drivers in the global market. These companies show bid-ask spreads and trading volume metrics comparable to those in the Launchbay 25 Index.
📈 Explore the full analysis and liquidity benchmarks