Iconiq VCs spent two years courting Chime and the firm isn’t selling its stake

Summary

The VC tech world was abuzz on Thursday when neobank Chime successfully became a public company. Chime raised $864 million on a its $27 share price, which popped big, opening at $43. This wasn’t the biggest IPO of the year. CoreWeave, for instance, raised $1.5 billion in March, and its first-day market cap hit around $14 billion, too. (Its share price and valuation has soared since then). However, Chime’s cap table includes an absolute who’s who of Silicon Valley investors, many of whom are publicly and privately celebrating the win for their portfolio company. This includes Iconiq’s Yoonkee Sull. He and his venture investing partner at Iconiq, Greg Stanger, spent two years watching and pursuing Chime before writing a check, Sull told TechCrunch. Iconiq is, of course, well known in the Valley as the family office to some of the industry’s most celebrated billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg. With $80 billion of assets under management, it invests in everything from stocks to real estate and also has a venture capital arm, which largely invests at the growth stage. Its portfolio includes Benchling, Canva, Databricks, Glean, Notion, and Ramp. If you’ve heard of a company, Iconiq probably has a stake. Sull said that he and Stanger first met Chime co-founders Chris Britt and Ryan King in 2017. They even went to the Chime offices for the meeting, not the other way around. Iconiq’s VCs tend to prefer outbound deals with well-vetted founders, rather than inbound pitch-to-us sessions. Still, to have Iconiq come calling just a year after Britt and King’s humbling 2016 was quite the turnaround. Chime was running out of cash in 2016. King had been desperate to raise and turned down by over 100 VCs, he told TechCrunch. Lauren Kolodny, then a partner at Aspect Ventures, today a co-founder of Acrew Capital, saved the company with a $9 million Series A extension round. Sull admits that that casual 2017 meeting “was early days at that point in time, but I think what they wanted to acc...