Affirm, an online lending company led by former PayPal CTO Max Levchin, spins out Resolve, an automated payments platform focused on B2B e-commerce
Resolve takes Affirm's buy now, pay later approach and applies it to business purchasing. — Affirm, a financial services company led …
Context & Ripple Effects
Affirm's spinout of Resolve comes days after the lender closed a ~$300M Series F at a $2.9B post-money valuation, giving it the balance sheet to run two bets at once: consumer installment lending and this new B2B payments platform built on the same buy now, pay later mechanics. The move extends the playbook that has defined the company since Max Levchin left PayPal and raised $275M in 2015 to rebuild credit around point-of-sale underwriting.
What makes the spinout more than a side project is how it aged: two years later Resolve independently raised a $60M round led by Initialized Capital, confirming that business-purchase financing could stand alone as a market rather than remain an Affirm feature.
First-order effects
- Affirm splits its roadmap in two — the parent stays focused on consumer checkout lending while Resolve takes the same underwriting approach to business purchasing, where buyers currently wait on manual invoicing and net terms.
- Merchants selling to businesses gain an automated alternative to extending trade credit themselves, shifting the receivables risk off their books and onto Resolve's platform.
Second-order effects
- Resolve's standalone $60M raise signals investors see B2B billing as a separate category, inviting dedicated competitors rather than leaving the space to consumer-BNPL players repurposing their stacks.
- Affirm's own distribution push — including its later partnership with Stripe following Shopify and WooCommerce deals — pressures other payments platforms to decide whether to build, partner with, or compete against B2B financing rails.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the boundary between consumer BNPL and business trade credit dissolves: underwriting becomes embedded software at the moment of purchase regardless of who is buying, and traditional invoice-net-terms arrangements become the legacy layer platforms route around.
- Spinouts of adjacent products from well-funded fintech parents become the standard way to test whether a consumer lending mechanic generalizes — with independent fundraising, not internal roadmaps, as the verdict.
The trend: Buy now, pay later is migrating from consumer checkout into B2B commerce, spinning off dedicated platforms that turn trade credit into automated, underwritten software.