Curu aims to make millennials credit smart

A few years ago Abb Kapoor and David Potter were so bad with money they couldn’t even get approval for an apartment in College Park their sophomore year of college.
“David didn’t have any credit and I had very little credit so we were forced to live on our friends’ couches while going to school,” Kapoor said.
Now the pair run a company that wants to teach millennials the ins and outs of building and maintaining credit.
“We realized that this crappy situation that happened to us also happened to other people and this could be solved,” Kapoor said. “We first wanted to create something that taught people about credit, but then we realized millennials don’t want to learn, they want something that does it for them.”
That’s how Curu was born.
The company name is short for Credit Guru, and two guys who at one point barely had any credit were on the way to becoming go-to money experts for their friends.
“Part of my passion for credit came from working as a leasing agent at an apartment complex and seeing people get rejected for apartments because they had bad credit,” Kapoor said.
Potter and Kapoor soon barreled their way through every entrepreneurial class and program offered at the University of Maryland and Kapoor built Curu’s algorithm. The beta version of Curu takes basic information like a user’s income and monthly expenses, and gives simple actions that can repair a person’s credit score.
Looking to take the company to the next level, the Curu team raised a family and friends round, poured all of their own money into the company, and got accepted to the Queen City Fintech accelerator in Charlotte, North Carolina. Kapoor put a pause on his studies when Curu moved to Charlotte this past spring.
Kapoor and the Curu team for the most part now split their time between Charlotte and Frederick. One team member is still holding the fort down in College Park. Terps linebacker Jalen Brooks joined the company after first trying to become an investor.
“Jalen lived at the apartment complex I worked at and he was very interested in Curu, he would always ask how things were going,” Kapoor said. “He initially asked to be an investor but I brought up the idea of having him join the team instead.”
This fall Brooks will be running plays on the football field and planning the soft launch for Curu.
Kapoor says the company is in the midst of raising a pre-seed round. They’re hoping to raise $500,000 to finish development by the end of fall and then go through a testing phase for the Curu app and fully launch by the end of January 2018.