Chime® is excited to welcome Gaelen Gates as its new Vice President (VP) of Legal. She brings 19 years of experience working with clients ranging from early startups to large publicly-traded companies, including tech and life sciences law firm Fenwick, fintech Credit Karma, and, most recently, at HR tech startup Checkr. She brings abundant experience scaling teams and processes, as well as a commercial approach to finding the right balance between managing risk and driving business growth.
In her role, Gaelen will oversee commercial and corporate law at Chime, continuing to build the Legal function and team as the company continues to scale. She will further integrate the Legal department within Chime’s many cross-functional teams to ensure that Legal successfully enables business growth while mitigating risk. She will report to Adam Frankel, Chime’s General Counsel.
“We’re thrilled for Gaelen to join Chime. Her extensive experience in tech and fintech and deep knowledge of how to scale best-in-class legal functions will support our strong growth trajectory and enable the entire legal team to better support Chime as we mature as a company.”
– Adam Frankel, Chime’s General Counsel
Before joining Chime, Gaelen was Associate General Counsel of Corporate and Commercial at background check startup, Checkr. While at Checkr, she built and trained the commercial and corporate law teams, establishing the processes and templates necessary to scale. Prior to her time at Checkr, Gaelen was Associate General Counsel at fintech Credit Karma. During her tenure at Credit Karma, Gaelen began as the second in-house attorney and scaled the corporate team through the company’s acquisition by Intuit in 2020. Before her work in-house, Gaelen worked at top Silicon Valley law firm, Fenwick. She holds a B.A. and J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
“I was drawn to Chime because of my alignment with the company’s mission and am excited to be a part of delivering the best products and services to our members. Chime is at an exciting moment of growth—I look forward to leveraging our team’s skills and empowering them to efficiently support the company as it scales.”
– Gaelen Gates, VP of Legal at Chime