Online payment service Affirm Inc. just rang up a $100 million Series D funding round.
This latest round, led by venture capital firm Founders Fund, comes almost exactly a year after Affirm raised a $275 million Series B round. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Affirm since its launch in 2012 to $420 million, according to CrunchBase. Affirm functions as a loan that allows shoppers to pay off online purchases in a series of installments rather than paying the full amount up front, with Affirm charging an interest rate ranging between 10-30%.
When checking out on an Affirm client’s website, shoppers are given the option to pay either with their credit or debit card or with Affirm. When a shopper clicks on the “continue with Affirm” option, they’re taken to Affirm’s website, where they sign up using their mobile phone number, birthdate, and last four digits of their social security number so that Affirm can get a credit report on them. Clients include luxury consignment e-retailer The Real Real Inc. (No. 206 in the 2016 Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide), online-only mattress manufacturer and retailer Casper Sleep (No. 290), and apparel brand BCBG Max Azria Group LLC (No. 431).
“We want to be able to bulk up our capacity to lend out,” Affirm marketing director Ed Lin says. “A portion of this money will be utilized to lend out to more consumers as we bring on more merchants.”
Over the past year, the company has grown its client base from 100 to 700 merchants largely via word of mouth.
“Affirm’s technology brings much-needed transparency and accountability to a stagnant industry that’s no longer meeting the needs of consumers,” Founders Fund partner Brian Singerman says.
Also participating in this round were Lightspeed Ventures, which participated in personalization vendor BloomReach’s $56 million Series D funding round earlier this year, as well as Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, all three of which were part of Affirm’s $275 million funding round in May 2015.
Affirm also announced it has hired former Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1 in the 2016 Top 500) executive Len Eschweiler as its new senior vice president of retail. According to his LinkedIn profile, Eschweiler spent two years at Amazon as the managing director of Amazon Services, which includes Fulfillment by Amazon, Product Ads and Amazon Payments. He left Amazon in December 2014 and most recently was senior vice president for worldwide sales at digital payments and billing company Avangate. Eschweiler had previously spent nearly a decade as a vice president at MarketLive Inc., a provider of e-commerce software.
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