consumer-permissioned-data
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Danielle Pensack Learned to Build Fintech by Calling 150 Retirement Homes
Before Rightfoot built data infrastructure for lenders, its co-founder moved into a retirement community to test an entirely different idea. The experiment failed cleanly - and became the operating system for everything that followed.
Tolga Tezel
Tolga Tezel is the founder and CEO of Canopy Connect, an insurance data infrastructure company that lets consumers securely share their insurance information with agents and businesses in seconds. A University of Waterloo electrical engineering graduate and former early engineer at Dropbox and Nova Credit, he prototyped Canopy Connect over a weekend after a dinner conversation with a friend's mother who ran an insurance agency. Since founding the company in February 2020, he has grown it to serve thousands of agencies and raised a $6.5M Series A, building what he describes as trusted, consumer-permissioned infrastructure for property and casualty insurance data.
Nova Credit
Nova Credit is a San Francisco-based credit infrastructure and analytics company that helps lenders extend credit responsibly to people traditional bureaus miss. Founded in 2016 by three Stanford classmates, it operates as a consumer reporting agency built around three products: Credit Passport, which translates a newcomer's international credit history into a U.S.-readable report; Cash Atlas, a cash flow underwriting tool that reads consumer-permissioned bank transaction data; and Income Navigator, which automates income and employment verification. Banks and lenders including American Express, HSBC, Chase, and PayPal use Nova Credit to reach credit-invisible and thin-file consumers.
Canopy Connect
Canopy Connect is a San Francisco-based insurtech that acts as the connective tissue between consumers, insurance carriers, and businesses. Often called "Plaid for insurance," its API and no-code tools let people securely share verified insurance details - auto, home, and commercial policies - in about 20 seconds by logging into their carrier. Insurance agencies, carriers, lenders, and other insurtechs use the platform to pull structured, real-time policy data instead of asking customers to type it all out or upload documents.
Rightfoot
Rightfoot is a San Francisco fintech that gives lenders real-time, credential-less financial data - live bank and debit-card balances retrieved without asking borrowers to hand over bank logins. Its API and portal let lenders and collections teams verify account ownership, confirm a borrower can actually pay, and time outreach to when money is in the account, cutting failed payments and defaults. Founded in 2016 and originally an employer-enabled student-debt repayment tool, the company pivoted to permissioned data infrastructure and now serves consumer lenders, business lenders, and collections agencies.
Argyle
Argyle is a consumer-permissioned verification platform that pulls real-time income, employment, and asset data straight from the source - payroll systems and bank accounts - through an API and no-code console. Instead of faxed pay stubs and HR phone calls, lenders, background screeners, and tenant screeners get instant, direct-source verifications covering roughly 90% of the U.S. workforce. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York, the company has raised over $100M from Bain Capital Ventures, Rockefeller Asset Management, Mastercard, Checkr, and SignalFire.
Shmulik Fishman
Shmulik Fishman is the founder and CEO of Argyle, a New York fintech that turns messy workforce and payroll data into a single consumer-permissioned API used by 300+ clients including Mastercard, SoFi, and LendingClub. A Hampshire College philosophy major turned operator, he co-founded the fleet-software company Stratim (acquired by KAR Global) before starting Argyle in 2018. He has raised roughly $100M+ and leads with a transparency-first, inbox-zero, early-morning style.
MeasureOne
MeasureOne is a San Francisco-based data infrastructure company that operates a Consumer-Permissioned Data Platform-as-a-Service. Through a single API, businesses can verify income, employment, education, and insurance directly from the source - only with the consumer's explicit consent.
Elan Amir
Elan Amir is the CEO of MeasureOne, a San Francisco-based consumer-permissioned data platform that enables businesses to verify income, employment, education, and insurance data with consumer consent. A UC Berkeley PhD in Computer Science, Amir brings decades of deep technical and operational experience - from co-founding a broadcast media company acquired by Inktomi, to serving as CTO at early mobile web pioneer OmniSky, to leading Bivio Networks as CEO for nine years through a cybersecurity pivot. He joined MeasureOne as COO in 2018 and became CEO in 2019, guiding the company to raise $7.1M and forge major partnerships with Experian, BeSmartee, and GDSLink.