A PayPal co-founder has raised $45 million for his new startup, Affirm

Max Levchin spent a year searching for the perfect person to lead his new online-lending startup until he realized it was him. Levchin, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded payments company PayPal and game maker Slide, is returning to the role of chief executive for the first time in four years to run Affirm, a startup hatched out of his technology incubator last year, he said in an interview. Over the past year, Affirm has quietly raised $45 million from venture capital firms including Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Nyca Partners and assembled a team of 32 that includes Nathan Gettings, co-founder of big-data startup Palantir. But perhaps the most promising thing going for Affirm is the pedigree of its new CEO. After selling Slide to Google for $182 million in 2010, Levchin left the Internet giant to set up his incubator, HVF, with the intention to start as many as 10 companies and then eventually commit himself to the most promising. Affirm is one of just two startups to come out of HVF so far, along with fertility-monitoring software maker Glow. Levchin said he decided to make Affirm his full-time job earlier this year after seeing the service gain traction in early testing and realizing the company’s potential impact. “There’s a short list of things that really make the world go ’round,” he said. “Finance is one of them.”