Nova Credit provides lenders, property managers and other businesses with real-time international credit reports in order for them to acquire immigrant consumers from around the world.
Nova started its journey as a graduate research project at Stanford University in 2015 and has since evolved into the premier cross-border credit reporting agency. Lack of a domestic credit history keeps millions of immigrants from realizing their dreams. The Nova Credit team hails from all over the world and experienced firsthand the challenge of not having a U.S. credit history, which can prevent access to housing and credit. Nova Credit provides a solution that enables immigrants to share their credit history from their home country with financial service providers and others, unlocking new consumers for lenders, and new futures for immigrants. They build integrations with credit databases internationally and allow lenders global access through a single API. In short, they have created the global platform for financial identity mobility so that immigrants never have to start from scratch again. Nova is revolutionizing the way consumers own and share their information and enabling them to access the credit and rentals they deserve.
Misha Episov
Co-Founder & CEO
Misha was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union. As the son of Soviet academics, he grew-up hopping between various college towns in the Midwest and East Coast. He studied Math and Finance at NYU and then completed an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before starting Nova Credit, he started his career in Goldman Sachs’ investment banking division where he focused on the global natural resources sector. After a few years at Goldman, he left to join the private equity team at Apollo Global Management. He worked with incredible teams at both Goldman and Apollo which developed a great foundation for how to think about both value and credit.
At Stanford, he realized that financial access for immigrants is a systemic problem and that the only way to actually solve it is to build a piece of financial infrastructure that was once thought impossible. Nova has now built the first cross-border credit bureau which links together the discrete credit databases around the world and in effect, enables people to move their financial identity wherever they go.
Nicky Goulimis
Co-Founder & COO
Nicky received her degree from the University of Cambridge in English Literature and Management Studies before attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business where she received her MBA and started Nova Credit with her fellow co-founders. Nicky, Misha and Loek all experienced the challenge that they are trying to solve around credit access as non-Americans, but exploring this problem while in school made them realize how much bigger this problem is than they had originally understood. Nicky was a former consultant at Bain & Company and an MBA Associate at North Forty Ventures and Equilibrium Capital.
Loek Janssen
Co-Founder & CTO
Loek is co-founder of Nova Credit and met Misha and Nicky while studying for his Masters of Computational Mathematics and Engineering. At Stanford, Loek and his co-founders spent a few months interviewing fellow students and friends about their experience with financial services and quickly spotted a trend. Nearly half of the graduate students at Stanford were international and nearly 100% of this half had a terrible experience with credit. As an international student, Loek experienced the hardships and the limitations of financial institutions while studying and building a business abroad. Loek received his BS in Economics and Mathematics from Vrije University in Amsterdam where he also became a researcher on stochastic signal filtering. He worked at Adobe as an engineer and distributed self-maintaining database systems in Spark, built from scratch.
