Building credit is hard when it’s difficult to even get credit.
And while it’s not impossible to get loans or credit cards, they are usually offered at high interest rates to the people who can least afford to pay them.
One Austin-based startup is out to help people build — or get — credit without taking on debt. And that startup, StellarFi, has just closed on a $15 million Series A round of funding to help it advance on that goal.
Lamine Zarrad started StellarFi in 2021 after selling another fintech company he’d started, banking app Joust, to ZenBusiness in 2020. Having faced his own struggles receiving credit as an immigrant, Zarrad was looking for a way to help others gain access to credit.
He started StellarFi on the premise …
