Born in Kyiv, then part of the Ukrainian SSR, to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, Levchin moved to the United States and settled in Chicago in 1991.

[6] He attended Mather High School, and then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1997.

In the summer of 1995, Levchin and fellow University of Illinois students Luke Nosek and Scott Banister founded SponsorNet New Media.

[8] After changing the company name to Confinity, they developed a popular payment product known as PayPal and focused on digital transfers of funds by PDA.

Levchin is primarily known for his 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.

[17][18] In early 2012, the financial technology company Affirm was spun out of HVF, with the goal of building the next-generation credit network.

[22] Levchin was a key early investor in Yelp, an online social networking and review service that started in 2004.

[31] Levchin appeared as a speaker at the 2007 Startup School organized by Y Combinator, where he described his own journey as an entrepreneur and the mistakes he made and lessons he learned.

[33] In 2022 Levchin was interviewed in an NPR podcast called "How I Built This" where he spoke about his early life and business endeavors including his role in PayPal.

Levchin was listed as one of the contributors to FWD.us, a Silicon Valley–based lobbying group spearheaded by Mark Zuckerberg and Joe Green.