Jay-Z-Backed Altro Partners with theCut to Help Independent Barbers Build and Establish Credit

Altro, the no-cost credit building app that uses nontraditional forms of payment history like Netflix and Hulu subscriptions, today announced its partnership with barbershop technology startup theCut.

Through its vast catalog of financial literacy offerings and ability to build credit through digital subscriptions, Altro will provide financial and credit-building access to theCut’s community of 45,000 barbers and counting.

Altro is bringing financial empowerment to any and everyone, including small business owners and self-employed individuals who have historically had a more difficult time achieving their financial goals. When business owners have not yet received or established business credit, lenders evaluate their personal credit, making it particularly challenging for these founders to gain access to loans that are critical to jump-start their business.

“We are providing free financial resources to independent workers like theCut’s community of barbers, who can build and improve personal credit by reporting their Cut subscription to Altro,” said Altro founder and chief executive officer, Michael Broughton.

“A lot of first-time entrepreneurs don’t realize that personal credit is evaluated by lenders when they’ve not yet received or established business credit, and we are creating that opportunity.”

theCut is a mobile app that provides information and reviews on barbers for potential customers, while managing appointments, mobile payments, and pricing on the back end for barbers. The company, founded in 2016 by Forbes 30 Under 30 founders, Obi Omile Jr. and Kush Patel, has booked over 40 million appointments by over four million clients who visited the 100,000 plus barbers across the country that use the app.

“Helping our barbers streamline and manage the backend of their business was only one piece of the equation: connecting them to financial resources in order to properly scale their business was another,” said theCut founder Obi Omile Jr.

“Altro’s modern solution to a dated problem is not unlike ours, and they’re empowering our community to understand their financials and improve their personal credit scores, which is key to the success of any new business.”

The partnership comes on the heels of Altro’s $18M Series A announcement, which was led by Pendulum with participation from Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures, Citi Ventures, Black Capital Fund, and Concrete Rose Fund, among other individual investors. theCut joins a running list of participating subscription services like Netflix, Youtube Premium, Dollar Shave Club, Adobe Creative Cloud, Nintendo Online, Apple Music, SoundCloud, Chegg, Crunchyroll, Audible, Sun Basket, Hulu, Spotify, Home Chef, Xbox Live, HelloFresh, Barkbox, Amazon Prime, CBS All Access, LinkedIn Premium, Coursera, PlayStation Live, HBO Max, Disney Plus, Blue Apron, Curology, FabFitFun, ESPN Plus, LeetCode, Birchbox, Ipsy, and Billie.

To learn more about Altro’s approach to democratizing credit building, visit altro.com. Download on the iOS App Store and pre-register on the Google Play Store.