Citing scaling challenges, fintech Cushion shuts down

Cushion, a fintech startup for negotiating bank fees, has shuttered its doors.

Founder and CEO Paul Kesserwani announced the decision via a LinkedIn post on Thursday, saying that “despite bringing multiple new fintech products to market, we didn’t reach the scale needed to sustain the business.”

“To build a sustainable, venture-scale business, we needed to reach tens of millions in [annual recurring revenue], but we never hit that escape velocity,” Kesserwani said in an email. “We made some pivots along the way — some showed early signs of traction, with one hitting $3 million in ARR in 10 months, but ultimately, it was more of a feature than a sustainable product.

“We faced the reality that Cushion wasn’t on track for a massive exit, and it made more sense to wind down rather than continue investing time and money,” Kesserwani said.

The decision to wind down the San Francisco-based company was made at the end of 2024, according to the post.

“I gave Cushion everything I had for 8+ years,” Kesserwani said in his LinkedIn post. “While the outcome wasn’t what we hoped for, we built something that moved the industry forward — and I’m proud of that.”

Cushion used artificial intelligence to help consumers dispute overdraft and other banking fees and negotiate refunds. Cushion also expanded into the buy now/pay later space by building a feature for users to pay their BNPL bills from a single dashboard and then give that payment data to Experian to build their credit score.

Cushion was featured in Plaid’s Scale Up e-book in September 2024 as one of “5 startups building the next great fintech app with Plaid.” Cushion partnered with Plaid back in 2017 to connect to financial institutions and pull transaction data.

Later on, the company’s relationship with Plaid expanded as they pivoted toward BNPL bill management services. “Plaid doesn’t just provide the infrastructure that we leverage and use but also the data, insights, and tooling we need to innovate at the cutting edge of consumer bill pay,” Kesserwani said in a video interview with Plaid in September 2024.

In Thursday’s LinkedIn post, Kesserwani said that Cushion had “automated bank fee negotiation,” securing $15 million in refunds for customers and processing over $300 million in BNPL loans. He added that the company had onboarded over 1 million consumers, with over 200,000 being paying customers.