With a Series A funding round under its belt, the fintech can take the next steps in rolling out its new bill pay offering
Cushion, a leader in bank and credit card fee negotiation, announced that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The funding will enable Cushion to hire talent across product, engineering, data analytics, and marketing as it readies its bill pay solution for a general audience after months of beta testing. The already talented team includes former leaders from Twitter, Bill.com, Square and Credit Karma, as well as several PhDs working on the machine learning side of the product. The round was led by Rose Park Advisors, with participation from Flourish Ventures, Vestigo Ventures, TSEF, Green Cow Venture Capital and CMFG Ventures Discovery Fund.
“We’ve built a reputation for being a capital-efficient team that makes big bets, solves difficult problems and puts forward solutions that are orders of magnitude better than competing offerings,” said Paul Kesserwani, founder and CEO of Cushion. “Over the past decade, we’ve seen e-commerce get optimized to death. It has become easier and easier to shop online, automatically apply a coupon at checkout, buy now and pay later. But paying bills, the very thing keeping the lights on, is fundamentally broken in this country. Cushion’s goal is to make sure consumers never miss a bill payment ever again.”
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An expanded roster of team roles will push Cushion closer to launching the streamlined bill payment solution. The new product offering is eagerly awaited by more than 100,000 current customers and has an additional six-figure waitlist. Cushion’s solution reimagines the bill payment experience as a single place to manage, pay and finance bills, allowing customers to track bills, avoid late fees and overdrafts and borrow money when needed — all while paying just one biller, Cushion. In turn, it will also provide customers with the opportunity to build their credit scores.
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Cushion’s bill pay offering will be in addition to its already successful fee negotiation product that refunded consumers over $10 million in a single year during the height of the pandemic. As pioneers of automated bank fee negotiation, the team is armed with over one billion transactions, a roster of top-tier fintech VCs and angel investors, and experienced shipping, monetizing, and scaling solutions. Bill pay will allow Cushion to tackle the foundational issue causing consumers to acquire fees in the first place, providing a way for them to successfully pay their bills on time, in full and fee-free.
“Two-thirds of consumer bills – totaling almost five times e-commerce spend in the United States – are paid manually and one at a time. We are thrilled to partner with the Cushion team to connect consumers and billers in a new and innovative way and give millions of individuals newfound confidence in their financial lives,” said Chris Calder, Principal at Rose Park Advisors.
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