The Covid pandemic crushed immigration and demand for Nova Credit’s tech. Then its founder discovered a second line of business.
By Jeff Kauflin, Forbes Staff
In early 2020, after four grueling years trying to prove itself to financial institutions and investors, Nova Credit was finally starting to taste success. It had built Credit Passport, a novel financial technology that enabled immigrants from India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada to import and convert their credit histories from back home into U.S. terms. American Express had signed on to use the feature since it helped the company approve customers it would otherwise reject due to their thin or nonexistent U.S. credit files. That February, Nova had completed a $50 million funding round, with backers including Kleiner Perkins, Canapi Ventures and General Catalyst valuing it at a lofty $300 million.
Aleksandr Karnyukhin for Forbes
Then the Covid pandemic hit, immigration abruptly stopped, and demand for Nova’s tech vanished. Banks’ usage of Credit Passport dropped by 75%, pulling Nova’s revenue down from $2 million on an annualized basis to about $500,000. “We had no market to sell into,” recalls Nova cofounder and CEO Misha Esipov, speaking from the startup’s bare-bones New York office. “Part of me wanted to run away.”
Instead of quitting, Esipov, now 37, led his team on a search for new product ideas, asking lenders about issues they faced–problems that a hungry startup might help solve. That summer, a SoFi executive said that with the big jump in unemployment caused by the Covid lockdowns, it desperately wanted to know which consumers still had jobs so it could assess their current (as opposed to historical) creditworthiness. Nova used some of the data-transfer technology it had already built to create a service that verified consumers’ income, rolling it out for SoFi in just four months.
The success of the SoFi experiment led Nova to jump into cash flow underwriting, a buzzy new concept where lenders assess the risk of individual consumers based on their current bank account inflows and outflows, often in addition to using a score based on their historical loan and credit card payments.
Esipov kept his original product alive while pursuing cash flow underwriting as a second line of business, defying the conventional thinking that a startup should do one thing well rather than risk doing two things poorly. Over the next year, he also resisted temptations to chase other hot areas of fintech, such as becoming a niche consumer digital bank or doing something with cryptocurrencies.
In 2022, as its cash flow underwriting business gained traction, Nova started to see demand bounce back for Credit Passport, along with a revival of legal immigration. But with the fintech market slumping, that couldn’t save it from a down round–it raised $45 million in 2023 at a $200 million valuation. Last year, growth finally took off, and Nova’s revenue reached an estimated $25 million, doubling from the year prior, with cash flow underwriting becoming its fastest growing business line and Credit Passport making up roughly half of its sales.
Cofounders (from left) Loek Janssen, Misha Esipov and Nicky Goulimis developed the idea for Nova Credit at Stanford Business School, then won a spot at Y Combinator in 2016.
nova credit
Nova counts five of the top ten banks in North America, including JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Canada, as customers, plus four of the top 5 telecommunications companies in North America, including Verizon (telecoms run credit checks when they finance phones for consumers).
Now the 90-person company faces yet another challenge: The cash flow underwriting industry, which Nova has hitched its future to, has grown intensely competitive, attracting deep-pocketed players ranging from Mastercard and Experian to Plaid. Nova has to be nimble to avoid being elbowed out of this growing and lucrative market.
In1990, the year before the Soviet Union’s collapse, then-two-year-old Esipov moved with his mother and father, both scientists, from their home near Moscow to upstate New York. The family had virtually no money and no access to credit. His parents needed to work for a year to earn enough to buy a Honda, and they split up when Esipov was five. Over the next nine years, Esipov and his mother moved into six different school districts as she tried to find better-paying employment, moving back to Russia for several summers to save money.
His mom worked jobs at McDonald’s and as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, and she finally got a big break when the elementary school she worked for sponsored her to receive a free MBA from the University of Illinois. That led to a stable job at Gallup in central New Jersey and allowed Esipov to go to college at New York University, where he studied math and finance. After graduating, he did stints in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and private equity at Apollo before earning his MBA at Stanford, where he came up with the idea for Nova and founded the company with two classmates, Nicky Goulimis and Loek Janssen.
The idea crystallized after the trio had conversations with international students at Stanford who all had trouble getting credit when they came to the U.S. To get Nova off the ground, Esipov was constantly on a plane, meeting with regulators and credit bureaus in countries like Mexico, India and China, trying to strike data-sharing partnerships and stitch together the world’s disjointed credit system. (Cofounder Janssen left Nova in late 2019 while Goulimis left active management in 2021, but stayed on the board until 2024. Both have since cofounded their own fintech startups outside the U.S.)
It took Nova a year to develop that first product and another two years to snag the first big customer, American Express. Finally, the business started to take off. Then came the pandemic, the immigration pause and the need for a new business line.
Since Nova Credit sold that first credit underwriting product to SoFi, data aggregation services like Plaid that connect financial apps to consumers’ bank accounts have continued to improve, with more uptime and better connectivity. That’s been a boon for cash flow underwriting products like Nova’s since they rely on aggregators to access consumers’ bank information.
Today Nova takes a multi-aggregator approach, pulling bank data through several providers including Plaid, Finicity and Akoya, a network owned by a consortium of banks. Once it retrieves the banking information, Nova runs its home-grown credit-risk analytics. (Those statistical models were built by Sarah Davies, Nova’s former chief data officer who had previously led credit modeling and scoring for VantageScore, which is owned by the big three credit bureaus and competes with FICO. VantageScore is now used by eight of the top 10 U.S. banks.)
Next Nova digitally sends the lender a score that ranges from 300 to 850, the same as FICO’s scale (which is based on credit history). From start to finish, Nova’s tech takes a few seconds to do its job, Esipov says. As a step to launch its original Credit Passport product, Nova became a credit reporting agency (CRA) in 2017, a regulatory designation that allows it to provide up-to-date consumer credit reports and handle credit disputes directly with consumers.
Why would banks or consumers give a cash flow model like Nova’s access to all that information? Because this new method seems to work. In 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) published research indicating cash flow data was “predictive of serious delinquency, even when analyzing people with similar traditional credit scores.” Nova offers more than 1,000 attributes–or cash flow data points and patterns–lenders can apply to loan-acceptance decisions.
Esipov says that in Nova’s experience, some of the most telling borrower data traits include consumers’ average cash balance and how those funds fluctuate. “There are people who get close to overdraft but never overdraft. That’s actually a good indicator,” he says. Overdrafts are big red flags and strongly depress someone’s Nova score.
Cash flow underwriting is now seeping into new areas of consumers’ lives where it can be used to judge if they’re likely to pay their bills. Beyond credit cards, businesses use Nova’s cash flow data to underwrite personal loans, buy-now, pay-later loans, car loans, student loans, mortgages and apartment rentals. Yardi, a Santa Barbara company that makes software for property managers and offers tenant screening through its subsidiary, RentGrow, signed up for Nova’s Credit Passport product and now uses its cash flow underwriting too, to help landlords verify the income of millions of rental applicants and prevent fraud.
Esipov thinks the market for cash flow underwriting is bigger than the market for his first product, Credit Passport. “I don’t know if it’s five years, ten years or more, but I think the end state is one where, for every single credit decision when credit bureau data is used, bank data will be used too.” In 2025, he aims to grow Nova’s revenue by 100% for a second consecutive year, which would bring it above $50 million by our estimate.
Yet the bumpy road will inevitably continue. With interest rates staying higher for longer than had been anticipated, banks have slowed down their pace of extending new credit, lowering the ceiling for the cash flow underwriting market. President Trump’s second term could put a damper on immigration, though Esipov notes Nova’s products focus on serving documented immigrants, and the “jury is still out on what will happen to skilled immigration.”
Nova has a growing set of competitors that include big names like Equifax, Experian and Mastercard’s Finicity, among others, plus smaller shops like Envestnet Yodlee and New York startup Prism. Plaid became a credit reporting agency (CRA) in late 2023 and recently expanded into cash flow underwriting; its integrations with over 10,000 financial institutions could make it easier for banks to get up and running with its cash flow underwriting products.
Esipov argues that Nova is the only multi-aggregator solution on the market that has its own CRA designation and analytics. Credit Karma cofounder and Nova board member Nichole Mustard insists that Nova’s strong focus on cash flow underwriting will help it make a superior product. “Plaid has a million things they do,” she says. “I think the people who are like, ‘Blinders on, this is what I do,’ they just win over time.” Jonathan Gurwitz, who leads Plaid’s sales strategy for its credit products, says Plaid’s cash flow underwriting tools “are strengthened by our broader platform, which helps lenders streamline everything from income verification to payments and fraud prevention.”
The issues Esipov worries most about today are speed and focus, he says. For instance, Nova’s Credit Passport is available to banks in the U.K., Canada and the United Arab Emirates, and Australian banks are asking the startup to come there, too. “Maybe 2026,” Esipov is telling them for now. “Our inability to pick where to focus will result in us losing in every area … that challenge of intuition around where to focus and where we see the most repeatability is a never-ending part of what keeps me up at night,” he says.
The CEO has a quirky habit of quoting management gurus–he cited four different ones during one afternoon of conversations with us in early January–and can’t help but to drop one from Peter Drucker: “First things first, second things not at all,” he says.
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