Chime

Co-founder Ryan King serves as Chief Technology Officer and has overseen the engineering team since 2013. Co-founder and CEO Chris Britt leads strategic and product direction. The company also brought in a chief product officer from Facebook in 2020 and a chief experience officer from Amazon, though recent product leadership changes have not been publicly detailed.

No. Chime operates through partnerships with FDIC-insured sponsor banks — The Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank — which hold customer deposits and issue its debit cards. Chime itself is a technology company that designs the customer-facing experience. This charter-light structure means Chime is not directly regulated as a bank, though its partners are.

Chime earns the majority of its revenue from interchange — the fee merchants pay when a Chime Visa debit card is swiped. It also earns a small yield on customer deposits placed at partner banks. This model scales with user spending rather than user distress, which is the structural opposite of a traditional consumer bank's overdraft-revenue dependency.

In October 2021, Chime raised a $750 million Series G led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities at a $25 billion valuation (per the firm's announcement, 2021). That made it the highest-valued US consumer fintech at the time. It has not raised new disclosed primary equity since, and confidentially filed for an IPO in late 2024.

Chime offers credit-builder secured cards and spot overdraft coverage up to $200, but the underlying credit risk is mostly held by partner banks. It does not operate a large on-balance-sheet loan book in the way a traditional bank or some fintechs do. Its credit posture is narrower, focused on low-risk consumer-credit access rather than aggressive yield-seeking.

Major disclosed investors include Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, General Atlantic, Tiger Global Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, Menlo Ventures, and Forerunner Ventures. Sequoia and General Atlantic have backed the firm across multiple rounds and hold board seats.

Chime serves consumers in all 50 U.S. states and has additional product and engineering offices in Chicago and Vancouver, Canada. It has not publicly disclosed international expansion outside North America. The Canadian office supports technology development rather than a Canadian consumer product, as of the most recent public updates.