Michael Broughton was the first in his family to go to college. But he almost didn’t, when he had trouble securing the necessary financing to pay his tuition.
The experience stuck with him, and when he met Ayush Jain at the University of Southern California, the pair bonded over their belief that credit access should be free. They came up with the idea of helping people build credit through recurring payment forms such as digital subscriptions to Netflix, Spotify and Hulu.
In December 2019, they started Altro — which started out as Perch Credit — and began hunkering down in a Hacker House with a few others to build out a platform that finds a person’s recurring transactions and connects them to a trade line that it reports to all three credit bureaus. For the unacquainted, a trade line is a line of data that goes directly into a bur …
