Inside Nova Credit’s Journey: The Company Making Credit Work for Everyone
About 100 million Americans are locked out of the U.S. credit system — not necessarily because they can’t pay their bills, but because traditional models simply can’t see them. Young professionals entering the workforce, gig workers with steady cash flow and newcomers with strong credit histories outside of the U.S. all share the same reality: they exist as financial ghosts in the system.
Being credit invisible has real consequences: it blocks access to housing, transportation and even a basic credit card. And these aren’t edge cases; they represent nearly a third of the population that the U.S. financial infrastructure fails to serve.
“There is a catch-22: only if you have a credit history can you get access to credit, and only when you have access to credit can you build a credit history.”
MISHA ESIPOV, COFOUNDER AND CEO, NOVA CREDIT
When Misha Esipov cofounded Nova Credit, a credit infrastructure and analytics company that enables businesses to grow responsibly, in 2016, he saw this as a major flaw in the existing system. “There is a catch-22: only if you have a credit history can you get access to credit, and only when you have access to credit can you build a credit history,” he explained. “Millions of people get locked out — and it’s broken. We set out to fix that.”
Nova Credit has seen strong validation in the market, raising over $159 million in funding and counting major financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase and PayPal among its customers. The company has attracted industry titans to its board, including Nichole Mustard, cofounder and former Chief Revenue Officer of Credit Karma, and Gene Ludwig, former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency.
The company is reimagining how financial trustworthiness should be measured — proving that your bank account data, your international credit history and your real-time cash flow tell a far more accurate story than what an algorithm from the 1980s says about you.
This is the kind of bold, industry-transforming insight that Socium Ventures looks for as an investor. “What makes Nova Credit a good fit for us is that it’s fundamentally helping people,” said Andrew Davis, Managing Partner at Socium Ventures and Senior Vice President of Strategy at Cox Enterprises. “The company is transforming credit from a one-size-fits-all model to one that reflects real lives, using data like cash flow and global credit history to price risk more fairly and accurately.”
That commitment to building a more fair and inclusive financial system is what drove Socium Ventures to double-down on its initial investment and lead Nova Credit’s $35 million Series D funding round.
“We come into every early investment with the expectation that we’ll invest more,” Davis said. “Unlike many funds with size constraints, we have deep, permanent capital and look to invest throughout a company’s lifecycle and for the long run.”
To understand how Nova Credit grew into a market leader, it’s worth revisiting the moments that shaped its mission, the milestones that defined its growth and the vision that continues to propel its team forward.
The starting point: solving the problem of being new to credit
Nova Credit’s story starts nearly a decade ago in the halls of Stanford University, where cofounders Misha Esipov, Nicky Goulimis and Loek Janssen were MBA students trying to understand how people make financial decisions.
Image Credit: Nova Credit
Esipov, in particular, found himself fascinated by the everyday choices students were making around money. He began interviewing classmates, asking simple questions like: Do you have a credit card? Where did you get it? Do you have student loans? What made you say ‘yes’ to the terms?
A pattern emerged. About half his classmates were international students, and all of them described the same challenge: arriving to the United States completely credit invisible.
“When you apply for credit or try to access the banking system, you’re typically locked out,” Esipov explained. “They just don’t know who you are and you have no history here.”
The irony is stark: many people who relocate to the U.S. have strong financial track records and cash flow before they arrive. That information simply doesn’t transfer.
That insight became the founding thesis: what if your credit history could travel with you?
For Esipov, the question was also personal. When his family immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, one of the hardest parts about adapting to a new country was building their financial identity from scratch.
“Fair and equal access to credit is how you can accelerate and de-risk the pursuit of the American dream,” Esipov said.
Nova Credit’s first chapter focused on bringing that idea to life for people who were new to the country. The team built a network that could securely access an individual’s credit bureau data from around the world — from Mexico, India, Canada, the U.K., Brazil, Germany and many more — and translate it into a format U.S. lenders could understand and trust.
Nova Credit spent its early years building the partnerships, data infrastructure and compliance capabilities that made cross-border credit possible. That foundation didn’t just power their first product, Credit Passport; it positioned the company for what they would build next.
A strategic move into cash flow underwriting
Nova Credit closed its Series B in early 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost overnight, global migration came to a standstill.
“Our addressable market disappeared,” Esipov recalled. “COVID nearly killed our business. Borders closed for the first time in a century, and when you don’t have an addressable market, you don’t have a business.”
Facing that existential threat, Esipov and his team made a critical decision. They turned to their customers — banks and lenders who were pulling back on signed deals to handle other burning issues — and asked them a simple question: what do you need right now, and how can we help?
Those conversations revealed the industry’s most urgent challenge. Unemployment had spiked, and lenders suddenly needed real-time insight into whether borrowers still had income and could repay. Traditional credit scores couldn’t answer that question.
“Our partners told us they needed to understand ability to pay in real time,” Esipov said. “Traditional bureau data was backward- looking — it couldn’t tell them if someone still had a job, still had cash flow. So we built the answer.”
“Traditional bureau data was backward-looking — it couldn’t tell them if someone still had a job, still had cash flow. So we built the answer.”
MISHA ESIPOV, COFOUNDER AND CEO, NOVA CREDIT
Image Credit: Nova Credit
In just five years, Nova Credit has emerged as the market leader in cash flow underwriting with its product, Cash Atlas.
“I’m incredibly proud of how our team turned an existential crisis into our biggest opportunity,” Esipov said. “We took what could have been a death sentence and built something the industry desperately needed.”
Last year, Nova Credit hosted its second annual Cash Flow Underwriting Summit, bringing together over 300 industry leaders from 38 of the top 40 banks and issuers. The standing-room-only event featured speakers from leading organizations like Chase, PayPal and The Points Guy.
Today, Nova Credit powers credit decisions for Chase, PayPal, SoFi, HSBC and thousands of property managers through partners like Yardi and AppFolio. This blue-chip validation across financial services and real estate underscores Nova Credit’s evolution from a promising innovator to a proven market leader.
With unique data infrastructure, CRA-grade compliance and deep credit expertise, Nova Credit gives lenders a clearer, more complete picture of consumers who have long been overlooked. The company has already unlocked more than $100 billion in credit access across cards, loans and leases, enhancing millions of financial applications and lifting approval rates by 15 to 40% in key segments.
Image Credit: Nova Credit
A growing partnership with Socium Ventures
Socium Ventures first partnered with Nova Credit during the company’s Series C in 2023, and the relationship deepened with this Series D round in October 2025.
“The founders and businesses we get most excited about are those with a real right to solve a problem.”
ANDREW DAVIS, MANAGING PARTNER, SOCIUM VENTURES
“The founders and businesses we get most excited about are those with a real right to solve a problem,” said Davis. “They uncover the core issue that needs to change as people who’ve lived it, not just studied it, and build a business around that insight. That authentic connection is where better solutions begin. Nova Credit is a prime example of that.”
Esipov recalls the early conversations that set the foundation for this partnership: “I was introduced to Andrew Davis through one of my former board members,” he said. “I walked him through our story, what we were building and our progress. He was immediately a believer; he saw the opportunity, as well as the strategic fit with Cox.”
A major advantage of partnering with Socium Ventures is its connection to Cox Enterprises. As Socium Ventures’ single LP, Cox provides a unique capital base — the backing of a $23 billion enterprise that owns, operates and invests in future-focused businesses.
This relationship gives Nova Credit more than just capital; it provides direct access to strategic guidance, commercial opportunities and operational resources. In Nova Credit’s case, that includes connections in automotive, a key sector the company is now targeting for expansion.
“What made Socium Ventures the right [investment] partner goes beyond capital,” Esipov explained. “In automotive alone — a critical sector for credit access — our growing partnership with Cox Automotive is in pursuit of a win-win-win scenario: lenders make better decisions, dealers sell more cars and consumers get more seamlessly approved for better financing.”
It’s a clear example of how the right investor brings far more than funding. They open doors to distribution, domain expertise and market acceleration that would take years to build independently.
What’s next: building the credit bureau of the future
Nova Credit’s Series D arrives as cash flow underwriting reaches an industry inflection point. Major lenders, property managers and financial service providers increasingly recognize that traditional bureau data alone provides an incomplete picture of consumer financial health.
“What got us excited to lead this round is that the company is gaining real momentum as it enters its next phase with cash flow underwriting,” Davis explained. “It’s a very big problem to solve, it opens up a very large market and we’re seeing accelerating traction that make this a compelling opportunity.”
“What got us excited to lead this round is that the company is gaining real momentum as it enters its next phase with cash flow underwriting.”
ANDREW DAVIS, MANAGING PARTNER, SOCIUM VENTURES
This fresh capital is fueling Nova Credit’s next chapter. The company is expanding its technology to support new use cases and enter new verticals. Nova Credit is also investing heavily in its multi-source network, bringing together third-party aggregators, on-us bank data, affiliate network data and even bank statements into a unified infrastructure. The vision is ambitious but clear: to build the credit bureau of the future.
“It’s a really exciting moment for the industry,” said Esipov. “As new data sources become available, Nova Credit’s ability to orchestrate them — through built-in analytics and compliance — makes cash flow underwriting truly plug-and-play, which brings us closer to our decade-long vision of building financial infrastructure that can confidently underwrite anyone, anywhere.”
Stay in the loop by following Socium Ventures and Nova Credit on LinkedIn.
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