BREAKING  Andrew Curtis named CEO of Clearco, Jan 2023 $3B+ deployed across 10,000+ ecommerce brands Funding tripled in 2024 65% of customers come back for more Rebuilt platform relaunched, Sep 2025 Brown · Chicago Booth · Fletcher School BREAKING  Andrew Curtis named CEO of Clearco, Jan 2023 $3B+ deployed across 10,000+ ecommerce brands Funding tripled in 2024 65% of customers come back for more Rebuilt platform relaunched, Sep 2025 Brown · Chicago Booth · Fletcher School
Andrew Curtis, CEO of Clearco
Andrew Curtis. The restructuring guy who stayed to rebuild the thing he was hired to study.
Profile / Fintech

Andrew
Curtis

He spent two decades untangling distressed debt on Wall Street. Then he walked into a fintech in trouble and decided to fix it from the inside.

CEO, Clearco New York Ex-Merrill · Lazard
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The Story

Hired to advise. He stayed to rebuild.

Andrew Curtis joined Clearco in July 2022 as an advisor - the polite title companies hand to people they want in the room but not yet on the org chart. Six months later he was running the whole thing. By January 2023 he was CEO of a Toronto fintech that had spent the prior years cycling through layoffs, leadership churn, and a business model that grew faster than it could hold together.

Most advisors would have written the memo and moved on. Curtis did the opposite. He took a company that lends money to online stores and rewired how it lends. The product is deceptively simple: Clearco fronts cash to ecommerce brands - the people selling on Shopify, Amazon, BigCommerce - and gets paid back from their revenue. No equity taken. No personal guarantees. No blanket lien on the founder's assets. Money in as little as 24 hours.

What makes that interesting is who built it. Curtis is not a growth-hacker or a career startup operator. He is a credit man - leveraged loans, liability management, financial restructurings, asset-based finance, securitizations. The unglamorous machinery that decides which businesses get money and on what terms. He brought that machinery to a market that had mostly been served by guesswork and gut.

At a glance
2023Became CEO of Clearco
$3B+Capital deployed to brands
10,000+Brands funded
3×Funding growth in 2024
What if capital actually got cheaper and more accessible as businesses got stronger?
Andrew Curtis — open letter, "Clearco Rebuilt"
The Rebuild

Two years in the studs

In October 2023, Clearco recapitalized - the financial equivalent of taking the engine apart while the car is still expected to move. Curtis used the reset to do something founders rarely get to do twice: start over with the benefit of knowing exactly what broke the first time.

The rebuilt platform launched at full scale in September 2025, two years in the making. The pitch he chose was not about rates or speed, though Clearco has both. It was a question he kept returning to in his open letter to founders.

01 / PRINCIPLE

No dilution

Founders keep their equity. Clearco takes a cut of revenue, not a slice of the company.

02 / PRINCIPLE

No guarantees

No personal guarantees, no blanket liens. The business borrows, not the person.

03 / PRINCIPLE

Built for messy

Funding designed for seasonal, volatile, opportunity-driven growth - the way ecommerce actually behaves.

In his words
Walking away isn't what committed operators do.
But real growth is messy. It's seasonal, volatile, and often shaped by sudden opportunities.
We don't just fund your next move. We actively help you spot opportunities your competitors miss.
We rebuilt Clearco to deliver capital that thinks like they do and moves as fast as they do.
Today, I am proud to reintroduce Clearco. Not just as a capital provider, but as the capital partner that thinks like a founder.
What will you build with a capital partner that thinks like a founder?
The Resume

Twenty years before the title

Curtis built his career in New York finance. He worked at Merrill Lynch & Co. and at Lazard Freres, two firms that sit on opposite ends of the same business - one a sprawling bank, the other a boutique advisory shop famous for restructurings. He then spent time across several investment managers, deepening a specialty in the parts of finance that matter most when things go wrong: leveraged credit and liability management.

Before Clearco, he advised Annaly Capital Management, a real estate investment trust focused on housing finance and the residential mortgage market. Mortgages, securitizations, restructurings - it is a long way from direct-to-consumer skincare brands. But the underlying question is identical: how do you price risk you cannot fully see, and structure money so both sides win?

His education reads like a deliberate refusal to specialize too early. An undergraduate degree from Brown University. A master's from the University of Chicago's Booth School. A second master's from The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts - a school built around economics, law, and international affairs rather than pure finance.

Timeline
  • 2000sFinance career begins in NYC - Merrill Lynch, Lazard Freres, then investment managers.
  • Pre-2022Advises Annaly Capital Management on housing finance and mortgages.
  • Jul 2022Joins Clearco as an advisor.
  • Jan 2023Named Chief Executive Officer.
  • Oct 2023Leads Clearco through a recapitalization.
  • 2024Triples capital deployment year over year.
  • Sep 2025Relaunches the rebuilt funding platform.
The Contrarian Bet

A credit specialist walks into a startup

There is a quiet irony in the setup. The classic Clearco customer is a founder racing to ride a trend before it cools. The CEO funding them spent his career on the other side of the boom - in the rooms where you figure out what to do after the music stops. That tension is the product. Curtis underwrites optimism with the eyes of someone who has counted the cost of it.

The market noticed. After years of turmoil, Clearco started growing again. Curtis told The Logic the company tripled the dollar amount of capital it advanced in 2024 versus the year before, and aimed for another 50% increase in 2025. Roughly 65% of customers return for additional funding - the kind of repeat-business number that suggests the terms are genuinely working for the people taking them.

He still reports to the founders who started it all. Clearco's board includes co-founders Michele Romanow and Andrew D'Souza, alongside investors from iNovia Capital and Founders Circle. The person who rebuilt the company answers to the people who built it the first time.

QuirkHired as a consultant, he ended up running the entire company within six months.
QuirkA distressed-debt expert running a startup-funding fintech - rare wiring for the job.
QuirkThree degrees: Brown, Chicago Booth, and Tufts' Fletcher School.
QuirkReports to a board that still includes the company's two original founders.
We don't just fund your next move. We actively help you spot opportunities your competitors miss.
Andrew Curtis on what "founder-first" capital should do

The aspiration is bigger than a loan book. Curtis wants Clearco to be the default capital partner for ecommerce - money that behaves less like a bank and more like a co-conspirator. Capital that gets cheaper as you get stronger, that shows up in 24 hours, and that treats a founder's volatility as a feature to fund rather than a risk to flee. Whether the market agrees is the open question. The early numbers say it might.

Go Deeper

Links & sources

Clearco website → Andrew Curtis LinkedIn → Clearco About / Leadership → "Clearco Rebuilt" open letter → Platform relaunch BusinessWire → The turnaround The Logic → Andrew Curtis Crunchbase → Clearco Wikipedia →