JPMorgan wants to be your startup's bank

THE PHONE CALL came at a retirement party. It was March 9, 2023, and JPMorgan executive Doug Petno was celebrating a colleague's career when Jamie Dimon pulled him aside to join a call with regulators asking a simple question: did JPMorgan want to buy Silicon Valley Bank? The answer, ultimately, was no — but only because JPMorgan was already getting what it wanted for free.

When SVB lost $42 billion in deposits and collapsed the following morning, the ensuing flight to safety delivered what Petno describes as "three years' worth of incoming clients in a weekend." Onboarding teams worked around the clock. JPMorgan, which had tentatively entered startup banking in 2016, suddenly found itself holding the keys to a market it had long coveted but never cracked. The bank has since quadrupled its startup client base to nearly 12,000, served by 550 bankers on both coasts. Revenue from the unit doubled in 2023 alone. By late April of that year, JPMorgan had acquired First Republic — another California lender serving the tech community — giving it both the client relationships and operational muscle to build what Petno pitched to the board as a full-spectrum competitor to SVB, Brex, Ramp, and Mercury.

Deposit flight, deposit fight

Yet becoming the startup world's one-stop shop requires more than catching panicked depositors. The pitch is seductive: serve founders from seed round to IPO, layering in private banking for individuals, commercial banking for companies, and investment banking for liquidity events. JPMorgan's $180 billion revenue base and nearly $20 billion annual tech budget give it resources no fintech upstart can match. The bank even dispatches teams to study how its own clients deploy AI — treating its startup portfolio as a kind of applied research lab for the parent institution.