Cushion, a Fintech startup that described itself as the “Plaid for Buy now, pays later (BNPL)”, closed.
Thursday, the founder and CEO Paul Kesserwani published on LinkedIn on the decision to close the company at the end of 2024.
In the post, Kesserwani said that “despite having brought newst Fintech products to the market”, the pillow “did not reach the staircase necessary to support the business”.
Founded at the end of 2016, the cushion based in San Francisco had collected a total of $ 21.6 million from investors such as capital, Flourish Ventures, Vesigo Ventures, Better Tomorrow Ventures and 500 Global.
His latest publicly announced increase was in May 2022 when he closed a $ 12 million Serie A led by a capital. His post-agent evaluation in 2022 was $ 82.4 million, according to PitchBook.
Kesserwani did not immediately respond to Techcrunch’s comment request.
Cushion offered a consumption app that sucked the chronology of transactions from the bank accounts of its users, determined which commissions had been evaluated and therefore conducted negotiations on their behalf to obtain a refund. He was designed, Kesserwani told Techcrunch in 2019, aligned with incentives with consumers taking only a commission on any cash returned.
Kesserwani had the idea of a pillow after leaving her job on Twitter. While taking some free time to think about what he wanted to do later, he was helping his parents manage their bank accounts while traveling for work in Lebanon. Due to bank security policies, his parents were unable to access their accounts from Lebanon and, finally, have faced a mountain of banking commissions while their accounts were not warned. While Kesserwani investigated, he turned to his accounts and realized that he had also paid commissions for $ 400 who had no memory of agreeing.
In Thursday LinkedIn post, Kesserwani said Cushion automated the negotiations of banking taxes and reached $ 3 million ARC in 10 months and has developed over 300 million dollars in BNPL loans. He added that the company had over 1 million consumers over time, with over 200,000 paying customers.
Kesserwani wrote: “I gave cushion everything I had for over 8 years. Although the result was not what we hoped, we built something that made the industry – and I am proud of it. As for me, I am enthusiastic about what is the next. “
The data suggest that 2025 should be another brutal year for the start arrests. At the end of December, another Fintech – bench – closes abruptly only to be acquired only days later.
