Eltropy (LinkedIn Page) develops AI and communications technology for credit unions and community banks, with a platform focused on helping community financial institutions drive growth, improve efficiency and customer experiences, and support regulatory compliance. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Eltropy Co-Founder and CEO Ashish Garg to learn more.
Ashish Garg’s Background
When asked about his background, Garg shared:
I grew up in India, in the Himalayas, in a small valley surrounded by mountains called Dehradun. I was in India for the first half of my life and finished high school there, then attended one of the best engineering schools in India.
It happens that my engineering school was founded in 1955 in collaboration with MIT, so a lot of MIT professors used to come teach there, and we still have a very similar curriculum. As a result, almost half of our graduating class comes to America every year to study further. That’s how I made my way to America in 2001.
I went to UC Santa Barbara, where I earned a graduate degree in electrical engineering. Then, for about 11 years, I worked in the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley. In 2013, after finishing my MBA from the Wharton School of Business, I started Eltropy.
How Eltropy Started
When asked how the idea for Eltropy came together, Garg explained:
I came to America in 2001, and in 2004 I graduated from UC Santa Barbara and got a job at a semiconductor company. Around the same time, I also joined my alumni association from my alma mater in India, BITS Pilani, which was active here in Silicon Valley.
I started as a volunteer in 2004, and over six years I rose to CEO of the alumni association. Through those six years, I met lots of alumni who’d come to America in the ’60s and ’70s, and what I learned was that a lot of them had made their mark through entrepreneurship.
I was doing well in my job at the semiconductor company, and they put me on an executive track and sent me to Wharton for an MBA. As I was wrapping up in 2013, I got my green card. As an immigrant, a green card is a big deal, because then you can do whatever you like with your career; you’re not beholden to an employer.
So I went to my wife and said, “Honey, I’m going to start my own company.” She asked what I was going to build, and when I said software, she wanted to know why a semiconductor guy would do that; I told her it had always come naturally to me.
She said, “Fine, you have six months. If in six months you can build something interesting, maybe something I can use in my own life, then go for it. That’s where the journey started.
When I started Eltropy, I didn’t have an idea of what software I was going to build. My co-founder and I had some interns moonlighting for us. They’d show up in the evening, we’d have dinner with them, and then for an hour or two all of us would be coding. It was slow.
About six months in, I had a reasonable idea of what I was going to build, and I realized we needed full-time engineers. So I did a friends-and-family round, raised about $100,000 in seed funding from five friends. We used it to hire four engineers in India. My co-founder and I were in America, our engineers were in India, and in January 2014 we started building the product.
Favorite Memory
When asked about his favorite memory working for Eltropy so far, Garg recalled:
There are lots of favorite memories: the early days, hiring my first team, putting out our first MVP.
But one that stands out: I hired my engineers in January 2014 and started building the product, and by April, three months in, I had my first client. His name is Daniel, a Wharton classmate of mine who was working on his own startup and needed software.
I showed him what I was building, and he said it was something he could use. My first order form was $750 a year. But just having Dan sign it, I cannot tell you how amazing I felt.
Then, of course, we implemented the product for him and his FinTech, and seeing the benefits he got from it was a very happy moment. This meant it was the first signal of a little bit of success.
Core Products And Features
When asked about Eltropy’s core products and features, Garg detailed:
Eltropy today is the #1 agentic AI platform for credit unions and community banks. Using AI and communication channels, we help drive four outcomes for these financial institutions.
The first outcome we drive is growth: helping them bring in more deposits and open more accounts, which is top-line growth.
The second outcome is efficiency: doing more and providing better service without necessarily adding headcount. For example, we automate phone calls with AI, so if you call your credit union’s 800 number, there’s a high likelihood an AI agent from Eltropy will pick up, have a human-like conversation, and resolve your question.
We’ve proven this can automate 90% of calls. This AI agent works 24/7 and cuts wait times to zero because we can quickly spawn hundreds of agents depending on call volume.
The third outcome, which everybody in financial services is after, is a better experience: for consumers, but more importantly for the employees who work at these institutions. A huge amount of the work inside these institutions is repetitive, manual, click-through work, done by hand every day.
Humans, to me, are best suited for providing advice, empathy, and building relationships, so what we do is automate repetitive work so people can focus on what they do best.
The last outcome we drive is regulatory compliance. These financial institutions manage people’s money, and a lot of people’s livelihood is at stake in how that money is managed, so it’s a heavily regulated industry with a lot of rules to keep in mind.
Growth, efficiency, experience, and compliance: that’s what we do for credit unions and community banks.
Building Trust In AI
When asked about recent challenges in the sector and how Eltropy has addressed them, Garg noted:
The biggest challenge lately is that credit unions and community banks want to use AI, and there’s a lot of promise in it, but people are genuinely unsure where to begin.
One of the biggest fears is: what if the AI technology doesn’t do the right thing? What if it hallucinates, or messes with people’s money and, in turn, their lives? There’s also a fear, a lot of it coming out of Silicon Valley, that AI is going to disrupt the job market and cost people their jobs. So there’s fear of the technology itself, and fear of the disruption to people’s livelihoods.
The way we’ve tried to address the first fear, whether AI will do the right thing, is by building guardrails: systems that constrain AI to certain tasks and keep it out of others.
Say you call a credit union at 9 p.m. and ask an AI bot for your account balance. You could ask that question in any accent, any language, in a dozen different ways. Figuring out what you’re actually asking, called disambiguation, is where we lean on AI.
But the act of fetching your balance, or authenticating your identity before that, we don’t want AI doing that. We want deterministic software there, something predictable and codeable.
So it’s a combination of applying AI to the ambiguous parts and deterministic workflows, with guardrails around all of it, to the parts that need to be predictable.
The bigger challenge, even bigger than the technical piece, is people’s distrust of AI, which comes from the hearsay that AI is going to massively disrupt the job market. I think a lot of that is overstated.
The way we try to counter it is by working with credit union and community bank leaders on a framework: AI isn’t coming for your job, but a human using AI could outcompete you if you don’t understand how to use the technology.
That means retraining people, redefining jobs, and really understanding where humans add true value. That’s part of why I started my podcast, “Human x AI”, where I bring on credit union and community bank leaders to discuss these sensitive topics and how we lead through the fear.
How The Technology Has Evolved
When asked how Eltropy’s technology has evolved since launching, Garg explained:
Tremendously. Thirteen years ago, if you’d told me I’d be building an agentic AI platform for credit unions and community banks, I would have said, what?
The name Eltropy comes from the word entropy, meaning chaos. We actually started by building an online learning platform, riding the MOOC (Massive Online Open Courseware) wave of that era, before we found our footing in financial services.
But right from the beginning, Eltropy was founded on the concept of entropy, or chaos. And the theory said that the way the universe is architected, by God or the creator or whoever you believe in, is that life and the universe only become more chaotic over time.
The question we set out to answer was how we could help simplify, organize, and make people’s lives easier, how we could remove some of that chaos. That founding principle still holds today.
Key Company Milestones
When asked about some of Eltropy’s most significant milestones, Garg highlighted:
The first significant milestone was raising that friends-and-family round, getting some capital, and landing our first client. Then it was years of work to really land on an industry vertical, financial services; we didn’t start there, we started in high tech.
From financial services, we went deeper into credit unions, winning our first, second, third, and fourth credit union in 2019. Then in 2020, when COVID hit, Eltropy took off in a big way: we signed 100 credit unions in a single year.
Fast forward to today, and we’ve become the fastest-growing FinTech serving credit unions and community banks. We have 750 community financial institutions as clients, gathered in a matter of six years, which has never been done before in this space.
Signing clients is one piece of it; making them successful with the technology and turning them into genuine fans of the product has been the most gratifying part.
In terms of what drove the COVID ramp: my co-founder has a saying that being lucky is being prepared when the opportunity strikes. COVID accelerated digital transformation that was already underway, and we were ready, because we’d already spent six years in the field understanding how credit unions and community banks operate and what regulatory and security requirements they had to solve for, with a product that was ready to go.
The second boost was the AI wave, which really took off when ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Well, it so happened that in April of 2022 we decided to make an acquisition of an AI company (Marsview.ai) six months before ChatGPT came out. And we were already building on top of it when ChatGPT launched.
Credit Union Of Texas Customer Success
When asked to share a specific customer success story, Garg said:
One of my favorites is Credit Union of Texas, based in Dallas, with roughly 150,000 members. They use our AI technology so that when someone calls their 800 number, our AI bot picks up and tries to answer the question.
We get 90% of those calls to zero wait time, and 55% of the mundane, repetitive tasks have been automated, which frees up their contact center agents to focus on more empathy-driven work – the tasks that need a human touch.
Why do you need the human touch? I’ll give you two examples. I love managing my own money. My wife, on the other hand, is scared of managing money. More often than not, I’m the one she works with, but if I’m not around, she’d rather go to a bank branch. There are people out there who need that.
It’s an irony that money isn’t life, but managing money is a very important part of life, and our formal education system never teaches us that. So where do we learn? Either from our families or by ourselves, and that’s not easy for most people; it’s very difficult. A lot of times people learn by making mistakes.
Funding
When asked about Eltropy’s funding, Garg shared:
Eltropy has so far raised approximately $250M in capital.
Total Addressable Market
When discussing the total addressable market Eltropy is pursuing, Garg explained:
The CFI (community finance) movement serves more than 155 million Americans and 8.5 Million Small Businesses, with $6 trillion in Assets Under Management. This industry generates ~$250B in top line revenue and ~$50B in net profit.
Out of the $200B in expenses in the industry, at least 25% ~$50B can be targeted for Agentic workflows, which is our TAM.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates Eltropy from its competition, Garg identified three areas:
Three main things. First, our vision is to build an end-to-end platform that connects the front office to the back office, using AI but also allowing for the human touch.
We’re building a platform; our competitors are building point solutions, so working with them means stitching together four or five different vendors, while with Eltropy you get one platform for everything.
That mirrors how technology usually evolves: point solutions multiply until the complexity forces a platform to emerge, and we think that’s the phase this market is in now.
Second, our philosophy is that the product has to be excellent, but service is the bigger differentiator. Think of two nice hotels: one where the room looks great but service is subpar, and another where the room looks just as good but the service is exceptional. What will you pick?
That’s the experience gap. It’s not just the product, it’s the product combined with the service, and that’s what I’m proudest of: how we serve our clients, any time of day, any day of the week. If something goes wrong, Eltrop’ians are there.
Third is being mission-driven. We build software for a living, but our mission is to serve the community financial institution movement.
That comes from my own experience: when I came to America in 2001 as a graduate student with very little to my name, and it was a credit union (Texans CU) that helped me get my first car, a used Toyota Corolla, and later my first home (Provident CU).
I know what it is to be at the bottom of the pyramid, with no credit history and no access to credit, and how hard that makes life. These community financial institutions stepped up for me, so now it’s my team’s turn to give back to the movement.
Future Goals
When discussing Eltropy’s future goals, Garg said:
My North Star: there are roughly 9,000 community financial institutions in America today, serving about 155 million Americans, two-thirds of the adult population. A lot of them live in small-town and rural America, not the metro areas.
My mission is to build a company that uses AI to make those people’s lives better, whenever they need access to their money, need credit, need a loan to send a kid to college, whatever their life situation is.
There’s a big segment of the population, baby boomers, getting ready for retirement, with a big wealth transfer coming, and real questions about how people plan for it. We’re in what people call a K-shaped economy right now, the haves versus the have-nots, and there are fundamental problems in this society that need solving.
My team’s talent is building software. The question is whether we can apply that skill to community financial institutions in a way that genuinely improves people’s lives and makes things easier for them. That would give me tremendous joy.
Bringing People Along With AI
When invited to discuss another topic, Garg concluded:
AI as a technology has enormous promise, maybe it is the most significant thing mankind has built. There’s also a lot of hype, in both a good and a bad way, and a lot of that still needs to play out; this isn’t easy and it isn’t fast.
My appeal to leaders in financial services and in tech is that we have a responsibility to regular people: to bring them along on this change, address their fears, and educate them.
Fearmongering for headlines doesn’t serve anyone. We have to find the right use cases, the right problems to solve and the outcomes to drive. That’s how this really takes off and creates the impact it promises.
