Max Levchin

Max Levchin is a computer scientist, known for co-founding PayPal. Levchin notably made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and is also the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test.

Levchin started PayPal in 1998, took the company public in 2002 and then sold it to eBay for more than $1.5 billion at the age of 26.

He has also founded or co-founded the companies Slide.com, HVF and Affirm. Additionally, he was an early investor in Yelp, an online social networking and review service. As the founder and CEO of Slide, which creates and distributes popular Web applications on Facebook, as desktop widgets, and elsewhere. Slide was used by more than 170 million people worldwide, and was eventually bought by Google.

HVF (standing for "Hard, Valuable, and Fun") is intended to explore and fund projects and companies in the area of leveraging data, such as data from analog sensors. In 2013, HVF launched Glow, a fertility app that helps couples conceive naturally.

In early 2012, the financial technology company Affirm was spun out of HVF, with the goal of building the next generation credit network. Affirm was created by Levchin, Palantir Technologies co-founder Nathan Gettings, and Jeff Kaditz of First Data. The company is based in San Francisco.

Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), Levchin moved to Chicago at the age of 16 and later received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Levchin sits on the board of several other companies and trains for triathlons.