Silicon Valley tech company Affirm is opening a Chicago office and plans to hire 100 employees by the end of the year.
Affirm announced Thursday that it will open a Chicago outpost in River North. It has so far hired 20 local employees and plans to continue hiring for sales, customer success, engineering and product roles in Chicago. The company said it's in the "late stages" of signing a lease for its River North office, but declined to provide the specific address.
Affirm is led by CEO Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal who grew up in the Chicago area and attended the University of Illinois. Levchin graduated from UIUC in 1997 with a degree in computer science and launched PayPal in 1999 alongside Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others in the so-called "PayPal mafia." He spent four years as the founding CTO of PayPal before going on to launch Slide, which was acquired by Google, and becoming the chairman of Yelp, a position he left in 2015.
Levchin founded Affirm in 2012, a financial-tech startup that allows shoppers to buy products and pay through simple monthly payments. It works with companies like Walmart, Peloton, Purple Mattress and Delta Vacations to help customers buy big-ticket items and pay them off over several months. Affirm says it works with over 4,000 merchants and has helped more than 4.5 million customers.
The startup has raised more than $1 billion in outside capital to date and is valued at nearly $3 billion.
The Chicago space will be Affirm's fourth office, along with San Francisco, New York and Pittsburgh.
“Chicago was my first home after immigrating to the United States when I was a teenager and, in many ways, it still feels like home,“ Levchin said in a statement.
Affirm said it chose Chicago for its access to talent and its central U.S. location, which bridges the gap between its existing offices on the coasts.
Affirm is just the latest Silicon Valley company to set up shop in Chicago. Salesforce, Goolge, Facebook, Glassdoor, Yelp, Stripe, and others have made moves in recent years to grow their presence in the Windy City.
