Misha Esipov is co-founder and chief executive of Nova Credit, which lets lenders and landlords use credit histories from other countries and cash-flow data to judge applicants. He arrived in the US as a child from Russia, and his family's first months there gave him the problem the company now solves.
Months Without a Car
His family settled in upstate New York in 1990. With no American credit record, they could not get an auto loan, and they went without a car for months until they had saved enough to pay cash. "It's really hard to get around in the suburbs without a car," he has said. "If a solution like Nova Credit had existed back then, it would have made our lives a lot easier."
A Class Project at Stanford
At Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he took an MBA in 2016, he enrolled in the engineering school's Lean LaunchPad course with two fellow immigrants: Nicky Goulimis, who grew up in Greece and the UK, and Loek Janssen, a Dutch-born student of computational mathematics. Both had struggled to rent apartments and sign up for phone plans. The three interviewed more than 100 foreign-born students. "One hundred percent of them tell the same story," he said. "It's not that providers are discriminating against immigrants, it's just that they don't know who they are. That was an aha moment for us."
A Credit Passport
Nova Credit went through Y Combinator in 2016 and built a way to translate foreign credit bureau data into a form US lenders could read. "You need to build a credit history, but you can't build a credit history without getting access to credit," he explained in a Stanford profile. He still keeps notes and quotes from professor H. Irving Grousbeck in a spreadsheet, and the company runs feedback training built on Stanford frameworks.
Cash-Flow Underwriting
The company later added products that read applicants' bank data. In October 2025 it raised a $35M Series D led by Socium Ventures to expand Cash Atlas, its cash-flow underwriting tool. His family once waited months to buy a car because no lender could see them. He has spent a decade building the means for lenders to see people like them.
