Back in late 1998, Max Levchin and three of his partners co-founded Confinity, a mobile security software developer specializing in secure digital payment solutions. A year and a half later, the company merged with Elon Musk’s X.com and by 2001, it was renamed to PayPal. The rest is, as they say, history. Since then, Levchin has been quite busy as he has founded several companies including Slide and Yelp and also served on the board of directors of Internet firms such as Yahoo and Evernote. Back in 2012, he co-founded Affirm, a San Francisco-based financial technology company specializing in loans. Four years later, Levchin started serving as the chief executive officer of his latest startup.
From the moment he became Affirm’s CEO, the famous Internet entrepreneur focused on raising funds in order to expand the company’s activities. This Thursday, Affirm announced another success in that endeavor as the company managed to secure $100 million from Morgan Stanley, a New York-based investment bank. With this latest round of financing, Affirm surpassed $400 million in funding raised since 2012.
For those unfamiliar, Affirm’s main product is an alternative to traditional credit services. It’s designed as a relatively simple loan system with no hidden fees as it allows people to pay for goods and services in installments. Affirm’s entire payment solution is based on the company’s proprietary technology which is capable of verifying purchases and assessing credit risk in just a few moments. Given how the system is so quick and doesn’t utilize compounding interest, it enables loan financing to a larger set of consumers than traditional solutions. To this day, Affirm has partnered with more than 750 retailers in the US and the service is continually expanding its reach. While it’s hard to predict how far will this additional $100 million in financing go, industry experts are predicting that Affirm will boast over 1000 partners by early 2016. As for its user base, the company is claiming that it will triple its year-over-year loan volume by December 31st and is hoping to maintain that expansion pace next year, as well. While that may sound ambitious, Affirm’s results speak for themselves and the company seems to be on the right track to shake up the banking industry from its very core.