Toronto-based fintech Clearco says it’s back in growth mode after a tumultuous period of layoffs, scrapped international expansion efforts and leadership changes. In an interview, CEO Andrew Curtis said the company, which provides financing to e-commerce businesses, tripled the dollar amount of capital advances it gave out in 2024 compared to the previous year, and is on track to increase it an additional 50 per cent in 2025.

Bounce back: Clearco gives funding to e-commerce firms in return for a share of their future sales. The company ran into trouble in 2022 after raising more than US$550 million in two separate rounds, including one led by global investment giant SoftBank, creating growth expectations that ultimately proved unrealistic. It later recapitalized the business in 2023, securing US$60 million from investors and new financing to support cash advances it gives its customers.

Curtis said the company has benefited as banks have made it harder for businesses to qualify for loans—due to higher interest rates and economic uncertainty from the U.S.-led trade war—and as venture capitalists have pulled back on equity financing. Businesses are increasingly looking for alternative sources of capital, he said. “We’ve been rebounding rapidly,” Curtis added.

Clearco now asks for fixed weekly payments based on projected sales rather than a percentage of revenue, according to Curtis, which he said lets businesses keep more of the money they make during busy periods like Black Friday—although it also means they have to keep coughing up the payments when business is slow. The company has also improved its ability to underwrite financing by asking for bank account data in addition to sales data from Shopify and Amazon, and has launched a popular rolling financing product that businesses can keep open like a credit card, which helps reduce churn since it doesn’t have a fixed term, Curtis said.

Belt tightening: The company now has about 110 staff, about a fifth of its head count in 2022. Curtis took over as CEO from co-founder and Dragons’ Den star Michele Romanow in January 2023, who herself took the top job from co-founder and former romantic partner Andrew D’Souza in February 2022. Romanow and D’Souza became legal residents of Barbados in 2021 and established a Clearco subsidiary in the country, raising questions about whether the company would remain headquartered in Toronto. It has opted to stay, opening a new downtown office in 2024, with about three-quarters of the company’s staff living in Canada. Curtis is American and lives outside New York City, saying he visits Toronto regularly.

Curtis said a focus on discipline and stricter standards for the businesses it will accept as customers helped Clearco weather the tariff shocks of April and May following U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement. “We were really vigilant. We were more sensitive to credit profiles or our customers’ financial health,” he said. “You cannot be such a slave to revenue growth or originations growth that you take your eye off credit and risk.”

Publicly traded fintech lenders have taken hits in the recent past as they took steps to protect against possible bad debt, putting more money aside to cover potential bad loans and reporting growing delinquencies. Curtis said “our assets have performed very well” through the tariff crisis, with a delinquency rate of less than one per cent for companies Clearco has underwritten recently.

Competition circles: Clearco pioneered the model of using readily available digital sales data to provide financing to e-commerce businesses in exchange for a cut of their revenue, which competitors such as Shopify, Square and Lightspeed have since adopted. While those companies have the advantage of built-in access to the sales data of businesses that use their platforms, Curtis said Clearco gets a clearer picture of their creditworthiness by asking for bank account data as well. He said that it uses the fact it’s a separate company as a selling point. “In the end, Shopify controls your storefront. If you take capital from them, you’re captive to them,” he said.

Correction: Clearco tripled the dollar amount of capital advances it gave in 2024. This story has been updated.