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After co-founding PayPal and building its fraud-detection backbone, Levchin launched Affirm in 2012, taking it public in 2021 and making it the dominant U.S. buy-now-pay-later platform processing billions through Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify.
Max Levchin is the Founder and CEO of Affirm, the leading buy-now-pay-later platform in the United States, and a co-founder of PayPal, the pioneering online payments company.
Levchin, born in Ukraine and raised in Chicago, co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel and others in 1998, serving as CTO and building the fraud detection systems that became critical to the company's success. After PayPal's $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay, Levchin founded several companies before launching Affirm in 2012 with the mission of creating honest financial products that improve consumer financial health. Affirm went public in 2021 and has become the dominant player in the BNPL space, processing billions of dollars in transactions with major retail partners including Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify. Levchin's career-from co-founding one of the most important fintech companies in history to building another category-defining platform-makes him one of the most accomplished serial entrepreneurs in American financial technology.
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