There is a specific kind of dread that arrives with a service estimate. The mechanic walks over, wiping their hands, and the number on the tablet is bigger than the one in your checking account. The dentist says the word "crown." The vet lowers their voice. These are not aspirational purchases. Nobody saves a Pinterest board for a transmission. And for years, the financing industry mostly ignored them, because the software of consumer credit was built for shopping carts, not for the moment the bad news lands.
Sunbit built its entire company on that moment. The Los Angeles fintech, founded in 2016, does one deceptively narrow thing: it lets people pay over time for essential, unglamorous, in-person services - auto repair, dental care, eyeglasses, veterinary bills, general healthcare - at the exact counter where the bill appears. You apply in under a minute. The check on your credit is soft, so it does not ding your score. The majority of applicants walk out approved. And the fees you would normally brace for - late fees, origination fees, penalty APRs - simply are not there.
That last part is not a marketing flourish. It is the product.
The rejection that started it
The origin story is almost too neat. Arad Levertov, a former major in the Israeli Navy who later earned an MBA at Duke and ran an $800 million lending business as COO of Enova International, moved to the United States and found himself denied credit - despite finances that should have made him an easy yes. The American credit system did not know him yet. It had no file. The rejection was not about risk; it was about the crude machinery of scoring.
Levertov teamed up with Ornit Dweck-Maizel, a longtime R&D engineer out of Intel who became Sunbit's CTO, along with co-founders Tal Riesenfeld and Tamir Hazan. Their bet was that a lender making a decision in the moment - with better data and machine learning rather than a single three-digit score - could say "yes" to far more people without taking reckless risk. The catch was distribution. You cannot fix in-the-moment lending from a website. You have to be in the room.
Why the service drive, and not the shopping cart
Most buy-now-pay-later companies chased e-commerce: sneakers, mattresses, concert tickets, the dopamine of the online checkout. Sunbit went the other direction, into the physical, boring, high-stakes rooms competitors found unsexy. It started in auto repair, wiring itself into dealership service departments where a $1,400 repair order can otherwise send a customer home to "think about it" - which usually means the work never happens and the dealership never gets paid.
The land grab worked. Sunbit is now available in more than 60% of U.S. auto dealership service centers, present across networks backed by brands like Nissan, Honda, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. From there it expanded into dental, where it became the second-largest patient financing option in the country, then into optical, veterinary and broader healthcare. The mechanic explains it. The front-desk coordinator explains it. Sunbit trained hundreds of thousands of these counter staff - it calls them "Sunbeasts" - to be its salesforce.
The "no fees, ever" moat
Plenty of lenders advertise low rates. Fewer make money the way most consumer credit does: on the slip-ups. Late fees, origination fees, penalty APRs - the quiet revenue that piles up when a customer misses a date. Sunbit removed all of it. No late fees, no origination fees, no penalty fees, no penalty APRs. Many plans carry no interest at all, and the interest-bearing ones are disclosed upfront, in dollars, before you sign.
Refusing fees sounds like a giveaway. In practice it is a filter and a moat. It forces Sunbit to make money the honest, harder way - by underwriting well enough that borrowers actually repay - and it makes the offer legible to a customer who is already stressed. When the pitch is "no gotchas," trust closes the sale at the counter.
Find the moment of maximum need that everyone else finds too unglamorous to serve - then be the frictionless "yes" right there, in person. Distribution at the point of pain beats a slicker app fighting for the crowded checkout.
How it stacks up
The competitive set splits in two. Broad BNPL names - Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay - live mostly at online retail. Health-and-service financing incumbents - CareCredit, Cherry, Wisetack - fight closer to Sunbit's turf. The differences are less about branding than about mechanics: whether the credit check is soft or hard, how many people get approved, and where the fees hide.
| Sunbit | Broad BNPL | Legacy medical card | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary venue | In-person service counter | Online checkout | Provider office |
| Credit check | Soft | Soft | Often hard pull |
| Consumer fees | None | Varies | Deferred-interest risk |
| Approval breadth | ~9 of 10 | Varies | Favors high scores |
| Merchant paid | Immediately | Immediately | Immediately |
Comparison reflects Sunbit's stated model and commonly reported features of the category; individual programs vary.
The business under the hood
Sunbit makes money from two sides. Merchants pay a fee to offer it - and in return, they are paid on the spot and hand off the credit and collection risk. Consumers pay interest on the plans that carry it, and nothing on the ones that do not. Increasingly, there is a third leg: the Sunbit Card, a fee-free Visa now offered through co-branded partnerships, including a 2025 launch with discount retailer Ollie's Bargain Outlet.
Underwriting is the whole game. Sunbit leans on machine learning and real-time data rather than a single credit score, which is how it approves roughly nine of ten applicants across the credit spectrum while still keeping loans sized responsibly - capped in the low tens of thousands, with terms that flex from a few months to several years.
Funding the loans is its own discipline. Sunbit has raised venture and growth equity - reaching an approximately $1.1 billion valuation and unicorn status around 2021 - and layered on serious debt: a $355 million facility in late 2024 backed by JPMorgan, Mizuho and Waterfall Asset Management, followed by an inaugural $200 million asset-backed securitization in August 2025. That ABS deal matters symbolically as much as financially: it is Wall Street agreeing that a book built one brake job and one filling at a time is worth packaging into a bond.
What it is like to actually use
Most people never download an app to find Sunbit. They meet it at a counter when a bill they did not expect arrives. A staff member hands them a phone or sends a text link. They enter a few details, a soft check runs, and within a minute they see plain-language monthly options with the total cost spelled out. Pick one, and the work proceeds - the crown gets made, the brakes get fixed, the dog goes into surgery. For online merchants, the same logic now lives at digital checkout through a Stripe integration and Sunbit's embedded-finance tools.
The other customer: the merchant
It is easy to frame Sunbit as a consumer product, but half of the machine points the other way. A dealership service manager, a dentist, an optometrist - each has the same quiet problem: a customer who wants the work but flinches at the total. When the estimate stalls, the shop loses the job and the customer drives away with a problem unsolved. Sunbit's promise to that merchant is blunt: approve more customers, get paid immediately, hand off the risk, and keep the relationship warm because there were no surprise fees to resent later. For a dental practice in 2026, Sunbit has advertised practice fees as low as 1.9% and no-interest plans stretching to two years - numbers aimed squarely at making the "yes" cheap for the office, not just the patient. That two-sided pull, consumer relief on one end and merchant conversion on the other, is what turns a financing tool into infrastructure.
Where it fits in the market
Point-of-sale lending is crowded, but Sunbit occupies a defensible corner of it: essential, in-person, recurring, and largely offline. Cars break. Teeth need work. Pets get sick. This is demand that does not depend on a shopping mood, and it is deeply embedded in physical businesses that are hard for a pure-online rival to reach. Being named to the Forbes Fintech 50 three years running, and watching its CEO collect an EY Entrepreneur of the Year award for Greater Los Angeles in 2025, are the establishment's way of noticing what the service counters already knew.
The open questions are the honest ones. A no-fee lender that approves generously is betting on the durability of its underwriting through a downturn - the model has not been stress-tested by a deep recession. And the very incumbents it is displacing have decades of provider relationships and capital. But for now, Sunbit has done the rare thing in fintech: it found a real, boring, enormous problem and made saying "yes" to it feel simple.