Clutch is on an upward trajectory moving almost as fast as artificial intelligence.

Founded in 2020 by fintech veterans Nicholas Hinrichsen and Chris Coleman, the digital origination and AI platform built exclusively for credit unions said it has tripled revenue since its last investment funding round 18 months ago, with $100 million in sight.

Clutch also said net revenue retention is 153%, and six of the 10 largest credit unions in the country are live on the platform. Among the top 30, market share is close to 63%.

All of this growth comes four years after Clutch signed its first SaaS contract “in a market most investors had written off as too fragmented, too regulated, and too slow to matter,” the company said.

In July, Clutch said it will launch what Hinrichsen calls the most significant product in the company’s history that early adopters have described as “the paradigm shift the industry has been waiting for.”

And Clutch noted capital is no longer the constraint.

Backed by a16z as lead investor, Alkeon Capital as a growth investor, and strategic industry insiders TruStage Ventures and Curql, the company has evaluated acquisitions in its market and passed on all of them. The conclusion each time: Clutch could build a better product in-house.

“The limiting factor for progress and growth is imagination and judgment, more than capital and headcount. All the budget we earmarked for M&A is going into tokens,” Hinrichsen said.

Hinrichsen built digital infrastructure for auto lending, fraud detection, and identity verification for seven years before Clutch, including while co-founding a used-car marketplace he sold to Carvana.

Clutch can help credit unions originate loans and deposits like a fintech, streamline operations, and deliver modern member experiences. Today, more than 200 credit union use Clutch’s unified origination platform and AI-powered agents to automate collections, communication, document collection, decisioning, and next steps across the lending and account opening journey.

In a news release, Clutch shared an anecdote involving one of its clients.

“When the fourth-largest credit union in the country deployed one of Clutch’s AI agents, it burned through three months of AI token budget in three weeks,” Clutch said. “According to the credit union, the agents now engage more members in a single day than a person in the same role could in 4.5 years. Staff who initially feared for their jobs became the platform’s strongest advocates: by the credit union’s account, bonuses doubled as employees shifted from performing tasks to designing new work for the agents.”

Clutch pointed out credit unions hold $2 trillion in personal assets and serve 130 million Americans. They are member-owned, structurally not-for-profit, and among the most trusted financial institutions in the country.

“They are also running on technology built before the iPhone existed,” Clutch said.

“For a decade, the gap between what their members expect and what their systems can deliver has been quietly compounding,” the company continued.

Clutch gave an example of how it can help.

A 20-year credit union member with $30,000 in savings and four paid-off car loans applies for a $25,000 personal loan and sometimes gets three different answers from three different loan officers.

“Good loans fall through the cracks of manual underwriting. Neobanks such as SoFi and Chime have captured many of the members credit unions might otherwise have kept — growth built substantially on that gap,” Clutch said.

“Legacy vendors have promised to close the gap for 10 years and none have,” Clutch continued. “The reason is structural: AI model progress cannot translate into credit union workflows when the underlying systems have no MCPs, no modern interoperability layer, and no way for AI to meaningfully touch the processes where money actually moves.

“Every AI deployment stays narrow, isolated, and linear. There are only so many applicants to follow up with and documents to collect. The ceiling is baked into the foundation,” Clutch went on to say.

Clutch insisted its platform built to change that situation. The company explained it this way.

“A chief lending officer can now set the institution’s lending strategy once and watch it execute consistently, across every channel and every member interaction, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday as faithfully as Monday morning. The ultimate loan factory,” Clutch said.

And here’s another client anecdote highlighted in the news release.

“One of the 10 largest credit unions in the country put numbers to it ahead of a recent board meeting: application time dropped from 18 minutes to 3 for a deposit account and from 16 minutes to 7 for a credit product, while automation rose from 42% to 82% on deposit applications and from 55% to 70% on lending,” Clutch said.