Small businesses do not fail because they lack grit. They fail because the capital stack moves like it is stuck in dial up. Paper forms, manual underwriting, weeks of waiting while payroll is tomorrow morning. That friction is expensive. NEWITY decided to treat that friction like a software bug. This Chicago-based fintech just secured an $11M strategic investment led by CMT Digital, and the headline is simple. artificial intelligence meets blockchain in a $350B gap in the U.S. small business loan market. But the real story is execution.
Luke LaHaie and David Cody, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of NEWITY, have been building in the trenches of small business finance since 2020. Not theorizing. Not tweeting threads about disruption. Building. They started in the chaos of pandemic-era relief and kept going, turning that operational muscle into a machine that has now helped more than 125,000 businesses access over $12B in capital. Read that again. 125,000 businesses. $12B. That is not a beta test. That is scale.
NEWITY’s platform focuses on SBA 7(a) loans and its own Growth Term Loans up to $350K. The pitch is clean. Streamline the application. Use AI-first underwriting to cut through the noise. Move 3x faster than the national average. Speed is not a luxury for a small business. It is oxygen.
Now layer in what CMT Digital is betting on. NEWITY is building infrastructure that converts small business debt into digital, tradable instruments and connects that credit to blockchain-enabled capital markets. Translation: make small business loans more liquid, more accessible to capital providers, and less dependent on slow legacy pipes. Debt that moves. Capital that circulates. A marketplace where Main Street is not waiting for permission from a fax machine.
The business lesson is not mystical. It is focus. Pick a massive, underserved market. Understand the regulatory plumbing. Marry domain expertise with real technology. Then prove it with volume. That is how you earn institutional capital. Not with vibes. With throughput.
CMT Digital did not fund a concept. They funded traction and a bridge between traditional finance and blockchain-native liquidity. That intersection is where the next decade of fintech gets interesting.
Congratulations to Luke LaHaie and David Cody for continuing to turn small business lending into something that feels less like paperwork and more like progress. In a world obsessed with unicorns, NEWITY is backing the workhorses. And when you finance the workhorses, you quietly finance the economy.
