Upsolve Announces $100 Million in Debt Relieved
For Immediate Release
October 8, 2019
Name of Press Contact: Andrea Wimmer
Email: press@upsolve.org
New York, New York -- This morning, Upsolve, a national legal services nonprofit, announced that it has relieved over $100 million in debt for low-income families across the United States. Founded in 2016, Upsolve launched its direct-to-consumer online web app for low-income individuals in July of 2018. Since then, it has experienced exponential growth, expanding to assist users in 47 states across the country.
Over 2,000 low-income Americans have used Upsolve to relieve their debt, improve their credit scores, and transform their lives. According to Lisa T., an Upsolve user, “What [Upsolve] provides is an amazing, unique, and love based resource. I am blessed!”
Upsolve is currently the largest legal services nonprofit in the United States for bankruptcy and now has over 150,000 unique website visitors per month. Rohan Pavuluri, CEO and co-founder of Upsolve, remarked, “We’ve come a long way since we used to sit down with every user in our office in Brooklyn. I never imagined reaching our current scale in such a short amount of time.”
In reaching this milestone, Upsolve has become one of the largest legal services nonprofits launched in the last two decades in the United States, measured by cases filed per year. Jonathan Petts, Upsolve co-founder and board chair, explained, “Our hope is that Upsolve can be a model for the future of legal services in America. We’ll never have enough free lawyers to meet demand, and self-service tools like Upsolve must be replicated by the public, social, and private sectors if we ever want to ensure everyone has equal access to our legal system.”
In the coming years, Upsolve will continue to focus on growing its bankruptcy service, while exploring ways to provide additional value to its users and opportunities to be an advocate for making the legal system more user friendly for people who can't afford lawyers.
According to Pavuluri, “We believe the fees that many low-income people need to pay to lawyers to access their rights in today’s democracy are like the poll taxes that people used to have to pay to access their right to vote. Literacy tests dominate our legal system in the shape of complex legal forms and processes. Legal complexity is a civil rights issue. We’re committed to addressing this structural inequity at scale, using technology to shift power to low-income families.”
About Upsolve
Upsolve is a 501(c)(3) legal services nonprofit that helps low-income families file for bankruptcy for free, using an online web application. To date, Upsolve has relieved over $100,000,000 in debt. Spun out of Harvard Law School, Upsolve has received numerous awards, including Fast Company’s World Changing Idea of the Year Award in Social Justice and the New York Times Good Tech Award. Upsolve is funded by Y Combinator, Eric Schmidt, the Robin Hood Foundation, the Legal Services Corporation, Jim Breyer, Vinod Khosla, Chris Sacca, and several others. For more information, please visit upsolve.org.
