credit-bureau
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TransUnion
The quiet third name on your credit report runs a billion-consumer data engine. Here is how a 1968 railcar spinoff became a Tru-branded machine for deciding who gets to borrow, rent and buy.
Equifax
Most people meet Equifax as a credit score. Its larger business is the invisible machinery that helps decide who gets a mortgage, a job, a benefit or a second look - rebuilt on a $3 billion cloud platform and shadowed by the breach that changed the company.
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.
Misha Esipov
Misha Esipov is the co-founder and CEO of Nova Credit, a San Francisco-based credit infrastructure company that translates international credit histories and consumer-permissioned bank data into underwriting decisions for lenders. Born in the Soviet Union and raised in the US, he founded the company in 2016 out of Stanford GSB after stints at Goldman Sachs, Apollo Global Management and Google. Nova Credit closed a $35M Series D in October 2025 led by Socium Ventures.