Fuse

Footwork leads the Series A in the AI-native LOS for traditional financial institutions.

Some industries have been early adopters of AI — the legal vertical, for example, has dozens of venture-backed companies with strong market pull, as law firms and companies seek to automate legal work, eminently possible due to LLMs and the textual nature of the work. But many industries are still laggards, with manual labor operations and old school systems-of-record that have thus far not been shaken by the current AI era.

Traditional financial institutions — think credit unions, automotive lenders, regional banks — are amongst the laggards. At the heart of consumer and commercial lending is the Loan Origination System (LOS), the platform that financial institutions use to manage the entire lending lifecycle, from application to underwriting to funding. The LOS is a system-of-record and system-of-action that is notoriously hard to get up-and-running, taking more than a year, and thus the industry trend has been to hang on to an existing LOS for 5-10 years before considering switching it. Yet, what we’re seeing in AI across several verticals at the moment is that agents can enable a system to get up-and-running quickly, demonstrate a short time-to-value, and displace an incumbent platform.

Enter Fuse, which launches today out of stealth, an AI-native Loan Origination System and Account Opening Platform.

We first met Fuse founders Andres Klaric and Marc Escapa back in 2022, when they were working on an automotive lending platform, Upfront. As they were originating loans, they became increasingly frustrated with the legacy software they were using, and realized an opportunity to reinvent the stack, particularly as they started to work with LLMs in 2023.

They re-launched as Fuse, which today serves a number of forward-thinking financial institutions. Navigant, for example, is a credit union that has never been able to get a system up-and-running as quickly as Fuse. Canopy is another credit union that is able to automate workflows that were previously prohibitively expensive before they made the switch to Fuse. Fuse enables these FIs to drive more revenue through handling more loan volume and decrease time-to-close, as well as lowering costs via reducing manual workloads, all through an agentic platform.

Today, the company is announcing a $5M Rescue Fund for Credit Unions, enabling the next 50 qualifying credit unions who join Fuse to receive full use of the Fuse platform free of charge until their existing LOS contract expires.

Fuse’s $5M Rescue Fund for credit unions, launching today.

Fuse is also announcing $25M in Series A funding led by Footwork, Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Clocktower, and FJ Labs, along with early investors and operators of companies such as Chime and OpenAI. More from Marina Temkin here in TechCrunch.

It’s been a delight to partner with Andres, Marc, and the team at Fuse. Just as our other vertical AI portfolio companies such as Confido in CPG, Elicit in scientific research, Waldo in brands and creative agencies, and WindBorne in weather are changing the status quo of their industries, Fuse is automating away previously manual operations and revolutionizing financial institutions. We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity ahead, and we’re hiring across engineering, operations, and sales, in NYC and remote — come join us.

The Fuse team at a recent offsite.