Chime pops 37% in Nasdaq debut after pricing IPO above expected range
CEO of Chime, Chris Britt, center right, rings the opening bell during the company’s initial public offering at the Nasdaq MarketSite on June 12, 2025 in New York City.
Andres Kudacki | Getty Images
Chime shares jumped 37% in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday after the provider of online banking services sold shares in an IPO that valued the company at $11.6 billion.
Late Wednesday, Chime raised about $700 million in its offering, and existing investors sold an additional $165 million worth of shares. The stock, trading under the ticker symbol CHYM, closed on Thursday at $37.11, up from its IPO price of $27. It’s market cap climbed to $13.5 billion.
Chime’s IPO, from a valuation perspective, represents a big step down from where venture investors like Sequoia Capital valued the company in its last fundraising round in 2021, when private tech markets were raging. The valuation at the time was $25 billion.
Still, Chime’s offering is the latest sign that the fintech IPO market is opening up after a multi-year freeze brought on by rising interest rates and valuation resets. Recent debuts from eToro and crypto company Circle have rekindled optimism in the sector, with both stocks seeing strong initial pops.
Chime reported $518.7 million in revenue for the most recent quarter, a 32% increase from a year earlier. Net income narrowed slightly to $12.9 million, down from $15.9 million in the same period last year.
CEO Chris Britt said Chime has built a loyal user base by serving Americans earning $100,000 a year or less, a group often overlooked by traditional banks.
“Two-thirds of our customer base use us as their direct deposit account and primary account relationship,” Britt told CNBC’s David Faber. “We help our members avoid fees, get access to short-term liquidity, build their credit and build their savings — and it’s that combination of services that really resonates and matters most to the everyday consumer.”
Britt said the company reached $25 million in adjusted profitability in the first quarter and has improved its adjusted profit margin by 40 points over the past two years.
The company’s top institutional shareholders are DST Global and Crosslink Capital. Iconiq was one of the firms that invested six years ago, when Chime raised money at a $1.5 billion valuation.
“We first invested in Chime in 2019 and continued to invest through subsequent rounds because of their singular, unwavering focus on serving everyday Americans — and the trust they’ve built with that core customer base,” Yoonkee Sull, general partner at Iconiq, said in an interview.
The average Chime customer completes more than 55 transactions per month using the Chime card and interacts with the app four to five times a day. Active member growth rose 23% in the first quarter from a year earlier, Britt said, with 8.6 million monthly active users and an increasing number turning to Chime to serve as their primary banking relationship.
Customer acquisition doesn’t come cheap. Chime disclosed in its prospectus that it spent $1.4 billion on marketing between 2022 and 2024. Britt said the retention rate is above 90% once users set up direct deposit.
“Sometimes for people, it takes a change in life — a change in their career, a job change — to be the point in time when they actually make the switch and use us as a primary bank account,” he said.
The company’s core revenue comes from interchange fees, the charges merchants pay when consumers swipe Chime-issued debit or credit cards. Britt said 72% of Chime’s revenue is payments driven, versus traditional banks that rely heavily on fees from overdrafts and minimum balances.
“It’s pretty simplistic,” said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Mizuho. “I’m actually surprised by how unsophisticated that business model is.”
Chime’s performance in the public markets may set the tone for what comes next. Several other fintech players, including Klarna, Gemini and Bullish, have already filed for IPOs publicly or confidentially.
“If it goes well — and you’ll know that in the next two to three months — I think you’ll see much more receptivity” from other companies in the pipeline, said David Golden, partner at Revolution Ventures and former head of tech investment banking at JPMorgan Chase.
“If it doesn’t go well,” Golden added, “I think they’ll continue just to sit on their hands and wait it out.”
Chime is a five-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, having made the annual list from 2020-2024.
Marc Benioff is keeping an eye on Palantir.
The co-founder and CEO of sales and customer service management software company Salesforce is well aware that investors are betting big on Palantir, which offers data management software to businesses and government agencies.
“Oh my gosh. I am so inspired by that company,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in a Tuesday interview at Goldman Sachs‘ Communacopia+Technology conference in San Francisco. “I mean, not just because they have 100 times, you know, multiple on their revenue, which I would love to have that too. Maybe it’ll have 1000 times on their revenue soon.”
Salesforce, a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, remains 10 times larger than Palantir by revenue, with over $10 billion in revenue during the latest quarter. But Palantir is growing 48%, compared with 10% for Salesforce.
Benioff added that Palantir’s prices are “the most expensive enterprise software I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe I’m not charging enough,” he said.
It wasn’t Benioff’s first time talking about Palantir. Last week, Benioff referenced Palantir’s “extraordinary” prices in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, saying Salesforce offers a “very competitive product at a much lower cost.”
The next day, TBPN podcast hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays asked for a response from Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and CEO.
“We are very focused on value creation, and we ask to be modestly compensated for that value,” Karp said.
The companies sometimes compete for government deals, and Benioff touted a recent win over Palantir for a U.S. Army contract.
Palantir started in 2003, four years after Salesforce. But while Salesforce went public in 2004, Palantir arrived on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.
Palantir’s market capitalization stands at $406 billion, while Salesforce is worth $231 billion. And as one of the most frequently traded stocks on Robinhood, Palantir is popular with retail investors.
Salesforce shares are down 27% this year, the worst performance in large-cap tech.
Salesforce and Palantir year to date stock chart.
Gemini Co-founders Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss attend the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City, U.S., Sept. 12, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Shares of Gemini Space Station soared more than 40% on Thursday after the exchange operator raised $425 million in an initial public offering.
The stock opened at $37.01 on the Nasdaq after its IPO priced at $28. At one point, shares traded as high as $40.71.
The New York-based company priced its IPO late Thursday above this week’s expected range of $24 to $26, and an initial range of between $17 and $19. That valued the company at some $3.3 billion before trading began.
Gemini, which primarily operates as a cryptocurrency exchange, was founded by the Winklevoss brothers in 2014 and held more than $21 billion of assets on its platform as of the end of July. Per its registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gemini posted a net loss of $159 million in 2024, and in the first half of this year, it lost $283 million.
The company also offers a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, credit cards with a crypto-back rewards program and a custody service for institutions.
The Winklevoss brothers were among the earliest bitcoin investors and first bitcoin billionaires. They have long held that bitcoin is a superior store of value than gold. On Friday morning, they told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” they see its price reaching $1 million a decade from now.
In 2013, they were the first to apply to launch a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, more than 10 years before the first bitcoin ETFs would eventually be approved. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s rejection of the application, which cited risk of fraud and market manipulation, set the stage for the bitcoin ETF debate in the years to come.
Even in the early days, when bitcoin was notorious for its extreme volatility and anti-establishment roots and shunned by Wall Street, the Winklevoss brothers were outspoken about the need for smart regulation that would establish rules for the crypto-led financial revolution.
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