Rohan Pavuluri ’14

In telling the tale of how he came to create Upsolve, a nonprofit online platform that empowers families to overcome financial distress, Rohan Pavuluri ’14 repeatedly mentions luck. He was lucky, he says, to go to Exeter and Harvard; lucky to have the instructors and professors he credits with shaping the trajectory of his life; lucky to meet his future Upsolve co-founder; lucky to get funding and gain traction as a startup. “If you ask me, is it either hard work or luck,” he says. “I’ll say 100% luck.”

Don’t be fooled. Though there may have been a bit of good fortune at his back, Pavuluri is driven, and at the age of 25, he’s already positively improved the lives of millions of Americans through his ingenuity, compassion and dogged determination. “It’s part of the American DNA that when people hit hard times, we give them a second chance,” Pavuluri says. 

The Upsolve site currently tallies more than 2 million visitors per year and — through educational tools and a free app that helps families file bankruptcy — has helped relieve $300 million in debt — numbers that will no doubt increase in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Invoking the organization’s slogan, “Civil Rights Should Be Free,” Pavuluri says, “There is a civil rights injustice that we don’t talk about in America, which is that low-income and working-class families live in a different legal system than everyone else. If you can’t afford a lawyer within our civil legal system, you have no right to a free lawyer. It’s a modern-day poll tax, in the form of legal fees. If you can’t pay legal fees, you don’t have the same rights as everyone else.”