JPMorgan Chase’s renewed bet on startup banking traces back to a single weekend in March 2023, when regulators asked whether the bank wanted to buy Silicon Valley Bank. The answer was no. But the chaos created a different opening: JPMorgan could try to replace what had broken, while capturing clients who were already running toward the largest balance sheet in U.S. finance.
A Weekend That Rewired Priorities
Doug Petno, now co-head of the commercial and investment bank, recalled being pulled into the crisis at a New York retirement party on March 9, 2023, when Jamie Dimon called him over to join a regulator call. Within days, California seized SVB after it hemorrhaged deposits, including a reported $42 billion outflow.
Inside JPMorgan, leadership weighed the appeal and the risk of buying a wounded lender at the heart of the venture ecosystem. They walked away partly because they were already seeing a powerful, real-time migration: founders and finance teams were opening accounts at JPMorgan at a pace Petno described as “three years’ worth” in a single weekend, with onboarding teams working around the clock.
That surge did more than add deposits. It changed how JPMorgan thought about the tech economy. Rather than simply inheriting an institution, the bank saw a chance to build its own franchise around innovators and their investors, and to do it in a way that fit JPMorgan’s scale.
Serving Clients and Studying Them
For a firm that generated more than $180 billion in revenue last year and plans to spend nearly $20 billion on technology this year, the goal is not just to win accounts. Petno described the tech ecosystem as both a customer base and a sensor network.
JPMorgan tracks emerging companies for practical solutions to problems banks live with every day, from cybersecurity defenses to new computing approaches. Petno said that when a client announces AI-driven job cuts, the bank sometimes sends a team to understand what really changed. The findings, he argued, are rarely a simple story of software replacing workers. Implementation of new AI agents can be only one piece, alongside earlier over-hiring and process inefficiencies.
That feedback loop matters because the bank is trying to modernize how it serves fast-moving clients that expect consumer-grade onboarding and support, even as they handle complex treasury needs and large funding flows.
Fixing the Friction That Founders Hated
JPMorgan started building a technology-focused client effort in 2016, but early coverage skewed toward larger, more mature companies. Petno said that was partly because the bank lacked a digital experience that younger founders demanded, and it lacked enough specialized bankers to cover earlier-stage companies at scale.
The complaints were consistent: opening an account could take too long, and payment issues could trigger old-school workflows such as branch visits. Petno summed up the modern expectation bluntly: if it takes more than 15 minutes online, many prospects abandon the process.
After SVB collapsed, JPMorgan moved quickly. It hired key talent from the former rival, including John China, who had been president of SVB Capital and now co-leads JPMorgan’s innovation economy coverage alongside Andrew Kresse. Then another opportunity landed. By late April 2023, JPMorgan bid for First Republic, another California-based franchise with deep relationships in tech and wealth, and won.
With learnings from both crises and First Republic’s platform, the bank said it doubled revenue from its innovation economy activities in 2023. JPMorgan also built internal triggers to route obvious signals into specialized coverage. Petno gave one example: a founder walking into a Chase branch with a large funding check may start in a standard account flow, but systems now flag the pattern and shift the relationship to the dedicated team.
A Bigger Footprint and a Bigger Ambition
JPMorgan says it has expanded its innovation economy client base to nearly 12,000 companies, supported by about 550 bankers across both coasts. The bank would not disclose revenue figures, but Petno said growth is running well ahead of core business lines.
Competition is intensifying. SVB is now owned by First Citizens. Digital-first platforms such as Mercury and Ramp have gained mindshare. Traditional players like Stifel and Customers Bank are active. Petno also pointed to how quickly the landscape can shift, noting that Capital One agreed to buy Brex for $5.15 billion.
JPMorgan’s strategy is to identify likely winners earlier, then grow with them. The payoff is not just deposits and payment volume. It is also the chance to provide higher-fee services over time, including capital markets guidance as companies scale.
Petno’s end-state is straightforward: a single institution that can support founders from the earliest funding rounds through global expansion, public markets, and the later-stage complexity that comes with being a household-name company. He argues that the bank’s scale is the advantage, but he also acknowledges the remaining gap: the digital experience still needs to leap forward, and a new product effort is underway to do that.