Felix
Steinmeyer

The Gap Nobody Wanted to Finance

Somewhere between the consultation and the treatment, patients disappear. Not because they don't want the care - a dental implant, a skin treatment, a vision correction - but because the payment conversation happens at exactly the wrong moment. Felix Steinmeyer decided that moment was a business problem worth solving.

Cherry, which Steinmeyer co-founded in 2019 with Charles Mourani, built a buy-now-pay-later platform specifically for health and wellness providers. Not a general-purpose consumer credit product. Not another credit card. Something purpose-built for the clinical context: soft credit checks, instant approval decisions, true 0% APR for short-term plans, and direct payment to providers so the cash never touches the patient's pocket. The idea that the merchant gets paid upfront while the patient pays over time sounds simple. The execution took years.

By April 2025, Cherry crossed a $2 billion valuation on a Series C round - joining a cohort of BNPL companies proving that the market's post-pandemic skepticism toward installment financing was a correction, not a conclusion. The difference between Cherry and the wave of consumer BNPL that flamed out is specificity. Cherry is not trying to compete with Klarna or Affirm for the Amazon cart. It is building rails for dentists, medical spas, dermatologists, veterinarians, and optometrists - a fragmented, underserved market that major lenders ignored because the average transaction size felt too small and the compliance surface felt too wide.

Steinmeyer's path to healthcare fintech runs through some unusual detours. Before Cherry and before Stanford, he worked as a special assistant to the CEO of Aston Martin Lagonda - the British luxury carmaker whose clientele is approximately the opposite of the small dental practice owner. He also spent time at Bruce Berkowitz's Fairholme Capital hedge fund, where deep-value investing meant buying beaten-down assets that others had written off. That lens - spotting value in overlooked markets - threads through both of his companies.

His first venture, Mason Finance, helped older Americans resell life insurance policies they no longer needed. A secondary market for life insurance sounds like niche financial plumbing, and it is - but it solves a real problem for a population with limited liquidity. Magna Life Settlements saw enough value to acquire Mason in 2019-2020. Steinmeyer took the exit and immediately turned toward the next overlooked market.