LEVCHIN
Maksymilian

• 1. Early life and education
• 2. Personal life

Maksymilian Rafailovych Levchin is a Ukraine-born American software engineer and businessman. In 1998 he co-founded the company that eventually became 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.

He founded or co-founded the companies Slide.com, HVF and Affirm. He was an early investor in Yelp and was their largest shareholder in 2012. He left a leadership role in Yelp in 2015.

Early life and education

Born in Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR to a Ukrainian Jewish family, Levchin moved to the United States and settled in Chicago in 1991. In an interview with Emily Chang of Bloomberg, Levchin discussed his overcoming adversity as a child. He had respiratory problems and doctors doubted his chance of living. With guidance from his grandmother and his parents he took up the clarinet to expand his lung capacity. He attended Mather High School, then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1997.

Personal life

In 2008, Levchin married his longtime girlfriend, Nellie Minkova. He has two children.