Adrian Nazari

Founder and CEO Credit Sesame

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Adrian Nazari is the founder and chief executive of Credit Sesame, a Mountain View, California fintech company built on a premise that now seems obvious and at the time was not: that consumers should be able to see their own credit score without paying for it. He started the company after the financial crisis, when millions of Americans had just discovered how much their credit standing determined about their lives and had no free way to look at it. The company’s first achievement was commercial rather than technical — Nazari spent months negotiating with a credit bureau for the right to release scores to consumers at no charge. From that beginning Credit Sesame grew into a broader financial-health platform: daily credit monitoring, the Sesame Grade, loan and card comparison, identity protection through the Sesame+ subscription, and online banking launched in 2020. The company reports a membership of more than 18 million.

Career Highlights

• Founded Credit Sesame in the aftermath of the financial crisis and has led it as chief executive throughout, to a reported membership above 18 million.
• Negotiated the bureau agreement that allowed Credit Sesame to give consumers free access to their credit score, at a time when scores were sold rather than given.
• Broadened the product from credit monitoring into the Sesame Grade credit assessment, the Sesame+ premium subscription with three-bureau data and identity protection, and comparison marketplaces for cards, mortgages, auto and student loans and insurance.
• Launched online banking services in March 2020, moving the company from advice into holding the customer relationship directly.
• Credit Sesame has raised a reported $161 million across eleven funding rounds.
• Previously founded and led Financial Crossing, and served as VP of Marketing and Business Development at the business process management software company Savvion.
• Serves on the board of BookingPal, and speaks regularly at fintech industry events including FinovateSpring.

Professional Journey

Nazari’s earlier career was in enterprise software rather than consumer finance. At Savvion, a business process management company, he ran marketing and business development in the late 1990s. He then founded Financial Crossing, his first venture on the finance side, which he led into the end of the last decade. That sequence — enterprise software discipline applied to a consumer finance problem — shaped what came next.

Credit Sesame was a direct response to the financial crisis. The crisis made credit scores impossible to ignore: they determined who could refinance, who could borrow, who could rent, and in some cases who could be hired. Yet the score itself sat behind a paywall, sold back to the consumer it described by the bureaus that compiled it. Nazari’s insight was that a free score would attract an enormous audience whose financial intentions were, by definition, legible — someone checking their score is very often about to apply for something — and that the resulting referral economics would more than cover the cost of the data.

Getting there required persuading a credit bureau to undermine a revenue line, which took months of negotiation and advocacy. Securing that contract was the founding act of the company. The consumer proposition followed straightforwardly: a free score with daily monitoring, an explanation of what was moving it, and concrete steps to improve it, packaged in the company’s own Sesame Grade rather than presented as a bare number.

The business has since layered on more. Sesame+ added three-bureau data, credit-building tools and identity protection as a paid subscription, which diversified revenue away from pure referral. Comparison marketplaces for credit cards, mortgages, auto and student loans and insurance monetise the intent the free score surfaces. And in March 2020 the company launched online banking, a significant strategic move: it took Credit Sesame from advising on a customer’s finances to holding part of them, with the direct relationship and transaction data that implies. Most recently the company has begun taking its credit intelligence to businesses as a platform, packaging fifteen years of consumer credit data and modelling for other companies to embed.

Nazari remains the company’s public voice, speaking at fintech industry conferences including FinovateSpring and writing on entrepreneurship and consumer finance, and he serves on the board of the vacation rental distribution company BookingPal. His framing of the business has stayed consistent: as he has put it, credit is not simply a score but something with a large social effect on millions of lives, and the gap his company exists to close is one of access and understanding rather than of technology.

Education

Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Master of Science in Management, Sloan Fellows Program

San Francisco State University

Bachelor’s degree, Electrical & Electronics Engineering