Ashish Garg

Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Eltropy

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Ashish Garg is the co-founder and chief executive of Eltropy, a Santa Clara company that sells AI-driven digital conversation and, more recently, agentic AI tooling to credit unions and community banks. The bet behind the business is that small financial institutions lose ground to national banks not on price but on responsiveness, and that the fix is to let a member text, video-call or message their branch and get an answer immediately. Garg has run the company since founding it with Chandra Bhople in 2013, taking it from moonlighting interns and roughly $100,000 raised from friends and family to more than 750 institutional customers and a fifth consecutive appearance on the Inc. 5000 in 2026. He came to the problem sideways, after some eleven years as an engineer and product manager in Silicon Valley semiconductors.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Eltropy in 2013 with Chandra Bhople and has been its CEO throughout.
• Grew the customer base to more than 750 credit unions and community banks.
• Led Eltropy onto the Inc. 5000 in 2026 for a fifth consecutive year.
• Launched what the company describes as the industry’s first agentic AI platform for credit unions.
• Directed the 2022 acquisitions of video-banking firm POPi/o and AI provider Marsview, alongside more than 250 new institutional clients that year.
• Finalist for American Banker’s 2023 Innovator of the Year; recipient of BAI’s 2023 Global Innovation Rising Star Award.
• Spent roughly eleven years in Silicon Valley semiconductors, including applications engineering and product management at Cypress Semiconductor.
• Volunteer leader of the BITS Pilani alumni association, joining in 2004 and rising to head it over about six years.

Professional Journey

Garg grew up in Dehradun, in the Himalayan foothills, and studied engineering at BITS Pilani before moving to the United States in 2001 for graduate work. He took a master’s in electrical engineering at UC Santa Barbara and went into the semiconductor industry, where he spent roughly eleven years - the aggregated record places him at Cypress Semiconductor first as an applications engineer and later as a product manager. He was put on an executive track there, and his employer sent him to the Wharton School for an MBA.

That sponsorship turned out to be the exit ramp rather than the on-ramp. In 2013, with the MBA finished and his green card in hand, he told his wife he intended to start his own company; by his own account she gave him six months to make something of it. He and Bhople raised around $100,000 from friends and family to hire engineers in India and began product development in January 2014 with a team of moonlighting interns. Their first customer, landed three months later, was a Wharton classmate.

Eltropy’s focus narrowed over time onto community financial institutions - credit unions and community banks - and onto the argument that these institutions could hold their members if conversations happened on the channels members already used. The platform expanded from text messaging into video, voice and chat, and in 2022 Garg bought two companies in a single year: POPi/o, for video banking, and Marsview, for conversational AI. The same year added more than 250 institutional clients.

The company’s more recent positioning is agentic AI, with Eltropy claiming the first such platform aimed specifically at credit unions and citing more than fifty system integrations. Garg’s own read on the 2026 market, given in company announcements, is that institutions are consolidating vendors rather than assembling point solutions, and that roughly half of new customers now deploy several capabilities at once. Alongside the product work he has built a conference and community presence around the customer base, running the EMERGE conference and a leadership summit and hosting a podcast, ‘Human x AI: Unscripted’, about how banking leaders are actually adopting AI rather than how vendors say they should.

Education

Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering

University of California, Santa Barbara

Master of Science, Electrical Engineering (completed 2004)

University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School

MBA, Business Administration (completed 2013)