Nova Credit, a San Francisco-based consumer reporting company, has closed its Series A financing round on $16m.
The round included investment from General Catalyst, among others, according to a blog post by the company.
Co-founded by Misha Esipov, Nicky Goulimis and Loek Janssen as a graduate research project at Stanford University in 2015, Nova Credit is a cross-border credit reporting agency aiming to solve the problem of credit access for immigrants.
During their time as students, the trio realised they shared a common problem, which was the inability to access their credit histories from their home countries.
Despite credit-worthiness, net worth or employment histories, their credit histories were inaccessible. Without a credit history that is easily accessible and digestible to US-based businesses, individuals are excluded from rental units, given sub-optimal rates on auto loans and other financial products.
To solve the problem, the trio launched Nova Credit. The company’s technogoly enables immigrants to transport their credit history around the world. Its platform integrates with credit databases internationally and allows lenders to globally access it through a single API. Nova Credit claims its API offers a seamless integration into any decisioning system and the raw data can be instantly ingested and returned with a recommendation in real-time.
TransUnion recently partnered with Nova Credit to help new Canadians transfer their credit scores from other countries.
The new product—TransUnion Global Credit Connect powered by Nova Credit—provides newcomers to Canada with a platform to import their historical credit information and have their international credit reports delivered to end-users such as banks, in a streamlined, standardized format. The foreign credit score is mapped to a Canadian equivalent score so that it can be consistently applied.
Commenting on the partnership Todd Skinner, president of TransUnion Canada said: “Many newcomers have amassed a robust credit history in their country of origin, but this history previously hasn’t followed them to Canada, making them essentially credit-invisible. With this partnership, many immigrants will benefit immediately with new opportunities to access credit.”
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