Affirm Inc., the POS lender, closed a $275 million round today, which coincides with climbing traffic.
The site is now hosting around 80,000 unique visitors a month.
SimilarWeb.com estimates that Affirm.com is getting around 250,000 visitors per month now. By comparison, PayPal.com, the site Affirm’s founder, Max Levchin, helped launch, gets around 311.5 million visits per month.
Affirm does its financing at the POS, unlike financial institutions which tend to lend outside the transaction point. Affirm appears to be making personal loans, and underwriting via cash-flow analysis when necessary. Here’s how Forbes describes its underwriting:
Affirm’s first payments tool, Buy with Affirm, allows online shoppers to pay for purchases in multiple monthly installments. A shopper must apply to use Affirm, but need only submit their name, mobile phone number, birthday, and last four digits of his or her social security number. To estimate risk, Affirm takes into account data from atypical sources such as social networks. In some cases, Affirm will ask the shopper to share bank account details to determine cash flow.
It is unclear how much Affirm has originated to date. Last September, Levchin said in 12 months Affirm will have $100 million loaned out to consumers.
The $275 million of capital will help. The series B funds come from five sources: Spark Capital, Jefferies Group, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Affirm is in a wildly competitive space of alternative lending. Count Lending Club, OnDeck and Funding Circle among Affirm’s competitors. It should be noted that all three of those competitors have raised more than $200 million of venture capital. And now Affirm has, too.