nova-credit
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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.
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.