Another member of the PayPal mafia is making waves with his new project. Max Levchin’s new consumer finance startup Affirm has raised $45 million from venture capital firms, including Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Nyca Partnersha. The investment isAffirm‘s first VC-backed funding round. Affirm is an online lending platform that uses big data to create personalized financing options for consumers looking for a loan. It calculates borrowers’ risk based on a range of personal data that goes far beyond the traditional FICO credit score and other benchmarks still used by big banks. Levchin is also leading the company as chief executive, a role he’s been out of for four years. His co-founders include Nathan Gettings, Palantir co-founder and chief technical officer, and Jeff Kaditz of San Francisco mobile gaming company.
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.”
