Affirm Goes Public at $11.9B Valuation and Climbing

Affirm, an online buy-now-pay-later platform, was listed on the Nasdaq on Wednesday at $49 a share under the ticker AFRM. Based on outstanding shares sold to IPO investors, the company saw an $11.9B valuation. Minutes after public sales began at noon, the price shot up to $100/share.

Company founder Max Levchin spoke through the big Nasdaq screen in Times Square as he virtually rang the starting bell. Levchin championed the hard work of the Affirm team.

Affirm makes money when a customer uses their tech to make a purchase at the point-of-sale.

Levchin is a member of the “PayPal mafia,” a co-founder of the online payments firm that went on to establish massively successful tech startups. Members of the “mafia” include Tesla’s Elon Musk, Linkedin chairman Reid Hoffman, and Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelmen.

After publishing earnings this summer, the San Francisco-based firm filed for an IPO on Nov 18. The move revealed revenue of $465M for the first 3 quarters of 2020 with a $66M net loss.

Embedded with the company’s S-1, were comments from Levchin that said:

“The barely-readable fine print makes only one thing clear to consumers: You’ll never know exactly what your purchase will really cost you,” Levchin wrote. “With most of the payments industry deriving profits from late fees, overdraft charges, and gimmicks like deferred interest, it’s not hard to agree that there has to be a better way; it’s time to evolve payments again.”

Levchin took to Twitter to post about the firm, championing the millions of transactions the platform has serviced since 2013, all without one late fee.

“More than eight years ago, we set out to take on credit cards and change the way we pay,” Levchin wrote. “We built Affirm from the ground up to align with the needs of consumers and merchants and to succeed when they succeed.”

Kevin Travers was a Reporter at deBanked.