Table of Contents
Serena Williams saw what 326 investors didn't.
When Wemimo Abbey and Samir Goel were pitching their rent-reporting fintech startup across the country, racking up credit card debt and sometimes sleeping in chain restaurants to cut costs, most of the venture capital world turned them away. Williams and her firm, Serena Ventures, were among the first to believe that building credit through rent payments was not a niche idea but a massive, underserved market.
That call has since paid off. Esusu, the fintech company Williams backed through Serena Ventures, is now valued at $1.2 billion, has raised more than $200 million in total funding and serves about 12 million people across 5 million rental units in all 50 U.S. states.
"The tech-enabled model really creates win-win situations for stakeholders from renters to landlords," Williams said at the time of Serena Ventures' investment in Esusu. "Our significant investment in Esusu will help the company scale and unlock more financial opportunity for people."
Serena Ventures, founded by Williams, is a venture capital firm focused on women and underrepresented founders, with a portfolio that spans fintech, e-commerce, health and education technology. The firm's investment philosophy treats the chronic underfunding of diverse founders as a market inefficiency rather than a risk signal. The portfolio now counts 16 unicorns among more than 85 companies, carrying over $33 billion in total portfolio valuations, with 53% of companies founded by women and 47% by Black founders.
Esusu fits squarely within that thesis. The company was co-founded by Abbey, who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, before his family relocated to Michigan with no credit history, and by Goel, whose parents immigrated from New Delhi and had to build financial identities from scratch in the U.S. The two met at the Clinton Global Initiative Conference in 2014 and formally launched Esusu in 2018.
Their pitch was straightforward: on-time rent payments, often the single largest monthly expense for American households, do not count toward credit scores unless someone reports them to the bureaus. Esusu built the infrastructure to make that reporting seamless for landlords and transformative for tenants. The platform records and reports rental payments to the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, TransUnion and Experian.
The problem they were solving is real and measurable. In 2025, Esusu helped 272,361 renters establish credit scores for the first time, a 34% increase year over year. Customers saw their credit scores rise by an average of 53 points, which the company says unlocks $77 billion in economic opportunity.
Before any of that traction materialized, Abbey and Goel were juggling full-time jobs at PwC and LinkedIn, respectively, while building the company on the side. Hundreds of investors passed. The founders burned through savings, maxed out credit cards to the tune of $100,000 each and once spent a night in a Denny's when they couldn't afford a hotel room on a fundraising trip to San Francisco.
Williams and Serena Ventures joined the $10 million Series A round led by Motley Fool Ventures. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and other mission-aligned backers followed. In December 2025, Esusu closed a $50 million Series C round that set the $1.2 billion valuation, making it one of the first Black-owned fintech startups to reach unicorn status in the U.S.
"We built Esusu on this idea that no matter where you come from, what you look like, or your financial identity, it should never determine where you end up in life," Goel said.
