Silicon Valley buy now pay later (BNPL) payments startup Affirm filed an initial public offering (IPO) for a Nasdaq listing, Affirm said in a statement on Thursday (Nov. 18).
According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the startup founded by PayPal cofounder Max Levchin saw a 93 percent spike in revenue growth for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, hitting $510 million. In the three months ending Sept. 30, revenue grew 98 percent year over year.
“We believe by using modern technology, the very best engineering talent and a mission-driven approach, we can reinvent the payment experience,” Levchin said in the filing.
“Legacy payment options, archaic systems, and traditional risk and credit underwriting models can be harmful, deceptive, and restrictive to both consumers and merchants,” he added.
The platform lets people pay for purchases across interest-free installments and has handled over 17.3 million transactions by 6.2 million people. Total gross merchandise volume (GMV) for the past four years is roughly $10.7 billion.
Affirm partners with more than 6,500 merchants, and approximately 64% of its BNPL loans were from repeat consumers in 2020.
The majority of Affirm’s total revenue for the months ending Sept. 30 — 30 percent — is from Peloton.
“The significance of Peloton in our portfolio has increased as a result of consumer spending trends on home fitness equipment, and there can be no assurance that such trends will continue or that the levels of total revenue and merchant network revenue that we generate from Peloton will continue,” Levchin.
Major stakeholders in Affirm include Shopify, Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others. Leading underwriters of the IPO include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays.
When Affirm filed a draft IPO, its estimated valuation was about 10 billion. It was valued at $2.9 billion in April 2019.
Affirm joins a surge of recent IPO filings by DoorDash, Airbnb, Roblox, Wish, Zoom, Lyft and others.
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