Affirm processed $22.3 billion in gross merchandise volume in fiscal year 2024 while employing 1,700 people. That ratio — $13.1 million in GMV per employee — is what the buy now, pay later model looks like when it's working: the underwriting algorithm does the heavy lifting, merchants pay transaction fees for access to a customer base that converts better with financing available, and the human workforce stays small relative to the capital being deployed. Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal in 1998 and received his share of the $1.5 billion eBay acquisition in 2002, founded Affirm in 2012 with a specific thesis: that consumer credit was being poorly priced because lenders were using FICO scores and income verification rather than the full behavioral and transactional data that modern technology could analyze. Affirm processes thousands of alternative data points in milliseconds without requiring a hard credit pull — a consumer experience that FICO-based credit approval cannot match. The $2.24 billion in fiscal 2024 revenue represents a 37 percent increase from $1.64 billion in fiscal 2023, driven by expansion into higher-margin consumer-interest products alongside the zero-interest Pay in 4 product that launched Affirm's consumer awareness. The fiscal 2024 milestone — Affirm's first GAAP-profitable quarter — resolved one of the central questions about the business: whether the unit economics could ever be positive once the company moved past its growth-phase investment spending. With a $17 billion market capitalization against $2.24 billion in revenue, the market is pricing Affirm as a high-growth financial technology platform rather than a consumer lender, implying continued rapid GMV expansion and improving take rates as the product mix shifts toward higher-margin loan types. Net charge-offs of 5.2 percent of average loans in fiscal 2024 validate the underwriting model's accuracy at scale.