Built on the belief that everyone deserves a financial cushion.
Paul Kesserwani grew up in Lebanon watching what happens when a financial system fails people. Not as an abstraction, but up close. When he came to America for college, he watched the 2008 housing collapse unfold and realized the problem was not unique to any one country. Ordinary people everywhere were caught in a system that made it easy to spend and nearly impossible to get ahead.
Cushion started in 2016 with a deceptively simple idea: use technology to fight back. Not metaphorically. Literally. The team built bots (using AI before AI was cool) that negotiated with human bank agents at scale, getting fees waived on behalf of people who did not know they could ask, or who did not have the time or confidence to try. They named the company Cushion because everyone deserves one.
“When we noticed consumers leaning on Buy Now Pay Later to finance everyday expenses, we knew we had to drop everything and build for this new, soon-to-be-mainstream, payment method.”
By 2021, the data was telling a story nobody else was paying attention to. Coming out of COVID, two things were happening at once: consumers were leaning on buy now, pay later providers more than ever, and the average payment size was shrinking fast. People had gone from financing TVs and Coachella tickets to financing groceries, gas, and fast food. Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay and others were quietly becoming infrastructure for everyday spending, and nobody had a full picture of what that meant for people carrying loans across five different apps.
BNPL providers had no incentive to share loan data, and Cushion was not willing to wait them out. The answer turned out to be hiding in plain sight: people’s email inboxes. Buried in confirmation emails and payment reminders was messy, fragmented, non-standardized loan data — but it was all there. Cushion’s ML team spent two years building the infrastructure to pull it together, turning messy, inconsistent inbox data into the first structured BNPL data layer in consumer finance. They processed 30 million emails and reconstructed $300 million in loans. Then kept going: utilities, subscriptions, free trials, SKU-level purchase data, credit card statements. If the inbox was a goldmine, Cushion built the mine.
