The credit bureau of the future, built by the people the old one couldn't see.
NOVA CREDIT, INC. — 44 Montgomery St, San Francisco. A cross-border credit and cash-flow underwriting company founded by three Stanford classmates, all immigrants.
Move to a new country and your financial past can vanish overnight. Years of on-time payments, a mortgage, a clean record - none of it follows you across the border. Nova Credit was built to fix that blind spot, and then to fix a bigger one: the tens of millions of people the credit system simply cannot see.
Nova Credit is a San Francisco credit infrastructure and analytics company that helps lenders extend credit responsibly to people traditional bureaus overlook. It operates as a licensed consumer reporting agency, which means the same regulatory rigor and compliance framework that governs the legacy bureaus governs Nova Credit too.
The company started with one of the most misunderstood populations in American finance: newcomers. An immigrant with a strong credit history in India, Canada, or the UK typically arrives in the United States and is treated as a blank slate. Nova Credit's first product, Credit Passport, translates that foreign credit file into a standardized, U.S.-readable report a lender can actually decision on.
From there the mission widened. More than 45 million Americans are "credit invisible" - they lack the file a traditional score needs, not because they are risky, but because the data is missing. Nova Credit's answer was to look somewhere else entirely: the money already moving through a person's bank account, shared with their permission.
That idea became Cash Atlas, a cash flow underwriting product, and Income Navigator, an automated income and employment check. Together with Credit Passport, they form a company that doesn't try to replace banks - it becomes the infrastructure they plug into.
Each product answers a question a legacy credit score can't: Who are you where you came from? How does money actually move through your life? And can we verify what you earn?
The world's first cross-border credit reporting system. It converts a consumer's international credit history into a standardized U.S. report, so newcomers don't start from zero when they apply for a card, loan, or apartment.
A cash flow underwriting product that reads consumer-permissioned bank transaction data - deposits, rent, recurring income - to give lenders a real-time view of financial health that a three-digit score misses.
Automated income and employment verification that cuts friction out of the application flow while improving accuracy - the check every lender needs, without the manual paperwork.
"We are in the middle of a transformation in how financial institutions enable credit decisioning."
Misha Esipov — Co-Founder & CEO, on the Series D
Traditional bureaus rely on a narrow file: past credit accounts inside one country. That model works well for people who have already borrowed and repaid at home. It fails newcomers, young adults, cash earners, and the gig economy - the "thin-file" and "credit invisible."
Nova Credit's data fills those gaps with cross-border records and consumer-permissioned bank data, so a lender can say yes to a creditworthy applicant the legacy system would have rejected by default.
Most fintechs try to disrupt the banks. Nova Credit sells to them. Chase, PayPal, HSBC, and American Express don't compete with it - they route decisions through it.
And because it's a licensed consumer reporting agency, compliance isn't a bolt-on. The FCRA framework, adverse-action handling, and data governance are part of the product - which is exactly why regulated institutions are comfortable building on top of it.
Roughly $160M raised across five rounds, backed by Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Canapi Ventures, and Y Combinator.
Figures are approximate, compiled from public reporting. Bar length scaled relative to the largest round.
Nova Credit is a B2B SaaS and data-infrastructure business. It sells its credit data, analytics, and underwriting products to banks, digital lenders, credit unions, auto lenders, and tenant-screening operators - typically on usage-based and subscription terms tied to data pulls and credit decisions.
Its customers include American Express, HSBC, Chase, PayPal, SoFi, Scotiabank, BMO, Yardi, and AppFolio, spanning cards, personal loans, auto, and rental housing.
It sits between the raw data - bank feeds, foreign bureaus, payroll - and the lender's decision engine. Legacy bureaus (TransUnion, Experian, Equifax) still own the core file; data networks like Plaid supply the pipes. Nova Credit's edge is combining cross-border coverage, cash-flow analytics, and CRA-grade compliance in one place.
As cash flow underwriting moves from experimental to mainstream, that middle layer is where a lot of the value is quietly concentrating.
After adopting Credit Passport, American Express reported that accounts approved through Nova Credit's cross-border data were 79% less likely to become delinquent than domestic account holders with prime scores - a signal that the "thin-file" applicant was never the real risk.
Misha Esipov, Nicky Goulimis, and Loek Janssen launch Nova Credit to make credit histories portable across borders.
The company goes through YC and raises seed funding to build Credit Passport.
Amex begins using Credit Passport to let newcomers apply for cards with their foreign credit history.
Kleiner Perkins and existing backers fund the scale-up of cross-border credit.
HSBC launches borderless credit checking; Nova Credit expands into cash flow underwriting with Cash Atlas.
Canapi Ventures leads a raise to grow cross-border and alternative-data products.
Data onboarding and underwriting are unified into one platform; BMO joins as a partner.
Two of finance's biggest names adopt Cash Atlas, and Nova Credit raises a Series D led by Socium Ventures.
It's a credit infrastructure and analytics company - a licensed consumer reporting agency - that helps lenders responsibly extend credit to people traditional bureaus miss, using cross-border credit data, cash flow underwriting, and income verification.
Credit Passport is Nova Credit's cross-border credit reporting product. It translates a newcomer's international credit history into a standardized U.S.-readable report so they can access financial services without starting from scratch.
Banks and lenders including American Express, HSBC, Chase, PayPal, SoFi, Scotiabank, BMO, Yardi, and AppFolio use its products to underwrite thin-file, credit-invisible, and new-to-country consumers.
Roughly $160M in total, including a $35M Series D in October 2025 led by Socium Ventures, with backers such as Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, and Y Combinator.
It was founded in 2016 by Misha Esipov, Nicky Goulimis, and Loek Janssen, three immigrants who met at Stanford. Esipov is Co-Founder and CEO.