People line up outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) headquarters on March 10, 2023 in Santa Clara, California.
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On the evening of March 9, 2023, a celebration for a retiring colleague in New York City took an unexpected turn for JPMorgan Chase executive Doug Petno. His boss, Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, pulled him aside with an urgent request: get on a call with federal regulators.
The question on the line was stark and immediate. With panicked founders withdrawing billions in deposits, was JPMorgan interested in acquiring the failing Silicon Valley Bank?
By the next day, California regulators had seized SVB, marking the largest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis. Over that tense weekend, JPMorgan’s leadership, including Petno—who now serves as Co-CEO of the Commercial & Investment Bank—deliberated intensely. They ultimately decided against the purchase. A key factor, as Petno told CNBC in an exclusive interview, was the sheer scale of the organic migration already underway. “We had three years’ worth of incoming clients in a weekend,” he said, describing how the bank’s onboarding teams worked around the clock to accommodate the flood of former SVB customers seeking safety.
Yet, that moment of crisis revealed a glaring opportunity. With SVB gone and competitors like Brex, Ramp, and Mercury dominating a profitable niche, Petno saw a vacuum. “We went to our board and said, there’s a vacuum in the market,” he recalled. “At that very moment, everybody saw the opportunity.”
More Than Deposits: A Strategic Pivot
For JPMorgan, a financial titan with over $180 billion in annual revenue, capturing the startup and venture capital ecosystem is a dual-pronged strategy. It drives specific growth in a high-potential segment and, critically, serves as a real-time intelligence network on technological innovation.
The bank, which budgets nearly $20 billion annually for technology, approaches this business as a two-way street. While it provides traditional banking and investment banking services to founders and VC firms, it also actively monitors these clients for solutions to its own operational challenges. Petno explained that when a corporate client announces AI-driven cost cuts, JPMorgan dispatches bankers to dissect the implementation. “They often find that implementing new AI agents is only a fraction of the reason for layoffs,” he said, noting that factors like over-hiring and process inefficiencies are more common culprits. This reverse-engineering helps the bank stay ahead of tech trends in cybersecurity, quantum computing, and beyond.
From Latecomer to Aggressive Contender
JPMorgan’s formal entry into this space began in 2016, but early efforts were hampered. The bank initially focused on larger, more mature startups, lacking both a digital-first onboarding experience younger founders demanded and a dedicated team to assess the risk of earlier-stage companies. Perceptions in the venture capital community were that JPMorgan was slow—account opening could require branch visits and extensive paperwork. “They want to go to the website to open an account, and if it’s more than 15 minutes, they’re done,” Petno acknowledged, summarizing the core
