He built a free app that quietly erased hundreds of millions of dollars in debt for people who were told the courthouse was not for them. Today he runs business at a voice-AI company. The thread between the two is shorter than it looks.
Rohan Pavuluri spends his days at Speechify, the voice-AI app that turns any text into something you can listen to - on your phone, in your browser, in your ears on a walk. As Chief Business Officer he is the person worrying about revenue, partnerships, and the strange, finite math of hiring. He still answers candidate messages himself. “There've been days where I wake up and I just have 20 responses from candidates,” he has said, “engineers or marketers, all excited to potentially be a part of Speechify.” For an executive at a fast-moving company, that is an unusually low altitude to operate from. It is also the tell.
Because before the business cards said Speechify, Rohan was the guy who noticed that the law had a price tag and decided the price was illegitimate. The company he co-founded, Upsolve, is a nonprofit. Its product is free. Its users are people who lost a job, drowned under a medical bill, or got caught by a predatory lender - and then discovered that the one legal tool built to give them a fresh start, bankruptcy, was guarded by a fee they could not pay.
The numbers do the arguing. Upsolve's free online tool has helped eliminate more than $700 million in debt for over 16,000 families. It started as a research project run by an undergraduate. It went through Y Combinator. It now reaches millions of visitors a year. And it began with a sentence that sounds like a slogan until you realize Rohan meant it as an engineering spec: civil rights should be free.
He grew up in Chicago, then went east to Phillips Exeter Academy, then to Harvard, where he picked statistics as a concentration and Upsolve as a vocation. “I definitely concentrated in Upsolve more than statistics,” he admitted later. He took ten independent studies so he could work on the project full time, and for his last two years he commuted between Boston and New York every other weekend to keep it alive. Most students treat college as a place to learn. Rohan treated it as a workshop. “I think a lot of people should treat Harvard not just as a school, but as an incubator,” he said - and then he proved it.
The seed was planted in a place built for exactly this: Harvard Law School's Access to Justice Lab, where Rohan worked as a research assistant under professor James Greiner. His job was to test self-help packets for people who could not afford lawyers. He kept running into the same wall. The forms were a maze. The maze was the point. And the people most likely to get lost were the people with the least to lose.
The summer after his sophomore year, with funding and mentorship from the Robin Hood Foundation, he went to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Brooklyn to study the problem up close. There, a bankruptcy judge introduced him to Jonathan Petts, a corporate bankruptcy attorney who shared the itch to fix it. In 2016 the two co-founded Upsolve. Harvard chipped in early money - roughly $200,000 to $300,000, including a President's Innovation Challenge prize.
Rohan's design philosophy was almost aggressively unglamorous. “The sexiest solution isn't necessarily the best one,” he said. “Cheap, fast solutions matter, and what's really important is to focus on the problem.” He left the courtroom theatrics to others. He just wanted the form filled out, correctly, for free.
In 2021, TIME named the then-25-year-old to its list of rising leaders for making bankruptcy relief reachable for ordinary families.
His talk, “An app that empowers people to solve their legal problems,” reframes access to justice as a design problem, not a charity case.
Board director of the National Center for Access to Justice and a member of the Legal Services Corporation's Emerging Leaders Council.
“Civil rights should be free.”
- his entire thesis, in three words“If you ask me, is it either hard work or luck, I'll say 100% luck.”
- a claim his record cheerfully contradicts“The sexiest solution isn't necessarily the best one.”
- on building cheap, fast, and useful“I definitely concentrated in Upsolve more than statistics.”
- on his real Harvard major“Treat Harvard not just as a school, but as an incubator.”
- advice he took literally“Everybody at the company should be recruiting. We believe in leading from the front.”
- on his Speechify approachUpsolve solved the bankruptcy form. But Rohan kept noticing adjacent locked doors. One of the largest: in many states, only licensed lawyers may give legal advice - which sounds protective until you are a person being sued by a debt collector, can't afford a lawyer, and there simply isn't one coming.
So in early 2022, Upsolve went to federal court and challenged New York's restriction, arguing it was unconstitutional to bar trained, vetted non-lawyer volunteers from telling people what to do when a debt collector comes calling. The argument is vintage Rohan: the rules were written to protect a standard of service that, for low-income families, does not exist in the first place. You cannot lower a quality bar that nobody can reach.
That same year he handed off the CEO title and moved into the volunteer Board Chair seat - the founder's version of staying close without standing in the way. The mission outlived his job description, which was always the idea.
Grew up in Chicago before heading east to Phillips Exeter and then Harvard.
Spent two college years shuttling between Boston and New York every other weekend to keep Upsolve running.
Worked on political campaigns during his high school summers before turning to legal access.
Built TeamPost because he kept thinking of LinkedIn posts and never actually writing them.
Harvard backed Upsolve early with $200K-$300K, including a President's Innovation Challenge prize.
On hiring: “Finding the person who actually sat in that seat shouldn't be infinite work - it's a finite task.”
Look at the two halves of his career and the same instinct runs through both. Upsolve took an expensive, gatekept service and made it free and self-serve. Speechify takes the act of reading - something many people cannot do easily, or cannot do at all - and makes it as simple as pressing play. Both are access stories. Both bet that the right technology can quietly hand power back to the person who was locked out.
He calls his own success luck. The pattern says otherwise. Rohan Pavuluri keeps finding the toll booth in front of a basic human right, and keeps building the road around it.