Chime

GitPod

Chime

Chime makes money almost entirely from interchange fees. Every time a Chime member uses their debit card, the merchant pays a swipe fee (typically 1-2% of the transaction).

Chime keeps a portion of that interchange. The model only works at scale — Chime needs millions of members making thousands of transactions to generate meaningful revenue.

But with 22 million members, the math works. Chime also earns interest on member deposits and fees from optional instant transfer services.

GitPod

GitPod started as freemium: a free tier of monthly cloud hours, paid plans for more hours and bigger workspaces, and enterprise contracts with self-hosted and dedicated options. As Ona it shifted toward enterprise contracts for running AI coding agents inside a customer's own cloud, with governance and security controls.

It said enterprise annual recurring revenue quadrupled year over year before the rename. OpenAI acquired the company in 2026, and existing customer commitments continue to be supported.

Chime

Chris Britt spent years working in financial services — at Visa, Green Dot, and other companies — and kept seeing the same thing: banks made a disproportionate amount of their revenue from fees charged to their least wealthy customers. Overdraft fees alone generated $35 billion annually for US banks.

The average overdraft was $36 for a $24 transaction — that's a 150% fee. Poor people were subsidizing free checking for rich people.

In 2012, Britt co-founded Chime with Ryan King (CTO) to build a bank account designed for people living paycheck to paycheck. The core promise was radical: no monthly fees, no minimum balance, no overdraft fees, ever.

You'd get your direct deposit up to two days early (because Chime could release funds as soon as they were notified of a pending deposit, while banks sat on the money for two extra days), and you could overdraft up to $200 without any penalty through a feature called SpotMe.

The product launched in 2014 and grew slowly at first. But the target market — working-class Americans frustrated with bank fees — was enormous.

Once people tried Chime and realized they'd never see another $35 overdraft fee, they told everyone they knew.

GitPod

The GitPod team came out of TypeFox, a German developer tools company in Kiel behind the Theia cloud IDE framework. Sven Efftinge and his colleagues realized the biggest pain point was not the editor itself but the environment.

Developers spent hours configuring machines, installing dependencies and debugging "it works on my machine" problems.

They launched GitPod to provide instant, automated cloud development environments. One click from a GitHub or GitLab repo opened a fully configured workspace with dependencies installed and tools ready.

Johannes Landgraf, who became CEO, and CTO Christian Weichel later led the company through its rename to Ona in 2025 and its sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Chime

Chime grew through massive direct-to-consumer advertising. TV commercials, YouTube ads, podcast sponsorships, Instagram campaigns — all hammering the same message: no fees, get paid early, no overdraft penalties.

The message resonated with a demographic that traditional banks ignored or exploited: working-class Americans earning $30,000-$75,000 per year.

The "get paid early" feature was the killer hook. Chime releases direct deposits up to two days before payday.

For someone living paycheck to paycheck, getting paid on Wednesday instead of Friday is life-changing. It reduced the need for payday loans and covered emergency expenses.

The feature spread through word of mouth faster than any ad campaign.

Simplicity was a deliberate choice. Chime doesn't offer investing, crypto, or dozens of products.

They do one thing — be a great bank account for everyday Americans — and do it well. While competitors like Cash App and Revolut chased feature bloat, Chime stayed focused on the core banking experience.

GitPod

GitPod grew through open source community adoption and one-click integrations with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, where a "Gitpod" button on a repo launched a ready workspace. It later moved upmarket to banks and pharmaceutical companies that wanted cloud development under tight security.

In 2025 it bet the company on AI agents, renaming itself Ona and claiming its own agents were producing most of its merged code. That bet ended in a sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Chime

Chime is not actually a bank. They're a fintech company that partners with Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank to hold deposits and issue cards.

This distinction matters because Chime doesn't have the regulatory protections and permissions that come with a bank charter. In 2021, the state of California ordered Chime to stop calling itself a bank in advertising.

The regulatory status limits what products Chime can offer and adds counterparty risk.

Unit economics have been questioned. Chime spends heavily on customer acquisition — hundreds of dollars per member through advertising.

If members don't use their Chime card frequently enough, the interchange revenue doesn't cover the acquisition cost. Chime needs high engagement to make the model work, and some members treat Chime as a secondary account rather than their primary bank.

The path to IPO has been repeatedly delayed. Chime was expected to IPO in 2022 but the fintech market crash made that impossible.

The company listed on Nasdaq in June 2025 at $11.6 billion, well below its 2021 peak of $25 billion. Public markets now price it in the open, which is a harsher judge than a private round.

GitPod

GitHub Codespaces, backed by Microsoft and GitHub's enormous distribution, was a direct competitor, and AWS stopped taking new Cloud9 customers in 2024, a sign of how tough the cloud IDE market was. Convincing developers to give up their carefully configured laptops proved hard.

Then AI coding tools threatened to make the whole category a feature. GitPod's answer was to reinvent itself as Ona, an AI agent platform, and ultimately to sell to OpenAI in 2026 rather than compete alone.

Chime

Chime Spending Account is the core — a fee-free checking account with a Visa debit card. Chime Savings Account offers automatic round-ups and a competitive APY.

SpotMe lets members overdraft up to $200 with no fees — Chime covers the difference and deducts it from the next deposit. MyPay gives members access to earned wages before payday.

The Chime Credit Builder card helps members build credit by reporting on-time payments to all three bureaus — no credit check required, no interest, secured by your own money. Instant Transfers move money between Chime members instantly.

GitPod

Before 2025: cloud development environments, instant pre-configured workspaces defined in a .gitpod.yml file, with prebuilds and support for VS Code and JetBrains, plus a self-hosted enterprise option. As Ona (since September 2025): a platform for running software engineering AI agents in secure, sandboxed cloud environments, with VS Code in the browser and access from phone, tablet or laptop.

Since August 2026 the technology is part of OpenAI's Codex team.

Chime

DST Global, General Atlantic, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Coatue Management, Dragoneer

GitPod

Speedinvest led the $3 million seed in October 2020, with Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures US. General Catalyst led a $13 million round in April 2021.

GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner led the $25 million Series A in November 2022. Total funding was about $41 million.