Nicky Goulimis

Cofounder and board director/Nova Credit

When Nicky Goulimis immigrated to the U.S. from England in 2014 for Stanford business school, she couldn’t get a cellphone plan. The U.S. credit system didn’t acknowledge her English borrowing history, which meant rejections by credit card companies, six to 12 months’ rent up front at apartments, and exorbitant interest rates for student loans. “Talk to anyone who has moved to the States from another country and they’ll tell you the various duct-tape solutions they’ve employed to get a foothold in the financial system,” Goulimis says. So in 2016, she cofounded Nova Credit with Loek Janssen and Misha Esipov, immigrant students with similar experiences. They knew that to make real change, they’d have to build a whole new infrastructure. They bushwhacked through thickets of regulatory red tape, inched toward trust with huge financial institutions, worked with credit systems around