Sept. 17, 2026
A Sioux Falls fintech company that aims to allow easier access to alternative investments is among the fastest-growing businesses in the nation.
IRA Financial recently was ranked No. 2,327 on the annual Inc. 5000 list, with 145 percent three-year revenue growth. The company specializes in self-directed retirement accounts, including IRAs and solo 401(k)s.
“We invested pretty heavily in modernizing our platform, services, our client portal that people use to do business with us and transact … we completely rebuilt our website, we modernized the systems we use internally, so most of our growth was focused to prepare us to be able to scale,” said Tyler Northrup, the company’s president, who has been with IRA Financial for three years.
“It’s exciting. There’s a lot happening quick.”
Still, it’s been a quiet albeit fast ride.
“A lot of people just don’t know what we do,” Northrup said. “Even though our clientele is national, we’re a business in Sioux Falls. We’re a business in South Dakota. And that means a lot to us.”
IRA Financial was founded in 2010 by Adam Bergman, a tax attorney who had a client wanting to do some alternative investing with his IRA funds.
“Adam, even being a tax attorney, wasn’t immediately familiar with it,” Northrup said.
Research led Bergman to an opportunity: a way for people to invest for retirement beyond traditional stocks and bonds, using alternatives such as real estate and private equity. He moved from New York to Miami and launched the business, then brought it to South Dakota in 2015.
He remains majority owner with minority private equity investors and continues to shape the company’s overall strategy and direction, while focusing on writing, teaching, and educating investors about self-directed retirement accounts, retirement tax rules, and alternative asset investing.
“The work ethic of the Midwest is something that brought him here, the division of banking and our state trust environments,” Northrup said. “South Dakota is a good place for a trust company.”
IRA Financial provides the platform for self-directed investing, not related advising services. It has grown to serve more than 27,000 active accounts with more than $8 billion in assets invested.
“It’s still a maturing industry, I would say,” Northrup said. “People are more and more learning about it all the time and it’s still seeing good early growth.”
The potential of the industry is what attracted new CEO Clay Cowan, who joined the company in July. He most recently served as chief marketing officer at IBM and previously held roles across consulting, fintech and consumer institutions at McKinsey and Gilt Groupe.
“The more I learned about the industry and the company, the more interested I became,” Cowan said. “I’m personally into personal finance … and I did not know anything about self-directed IRAs … this niche of the retirement space … I learned what an interesting sort of undiscovered space (it is). It’s just not on the radar, and it should be.”
IRA Financial’s platform has evolved in recent years in alignment with its rapid growth. It now offers broad access to alternative assets, cryptocurrency and public markets within a single tax-advantaged account and a flat annual fee model. Earlier this year, an update allowed investors to access traditional investments alongside their alternatives inside one platform.
“I think people like the tech-centered model,” Cowan said. “We believe a flat fee is more aligned with investor outcomes. We are a tech platform that offers this service, and we offer a service fee. As your investments grow, we don’t charge you more.”
Customers generally seek out IRA Financial “with a deal in mind,” he said, using a real estate investment as an example.
“And they have learned about the account structure as a good way to do them and get access to the capital they have.”
The company is similar to popular platforms such as Robinhood and Betterment — commission-free investing and trading platforms used to trade stocks, options and cryptocurrencies.
“We have a lot of admiration for those, but those platforms don’t offer the ability to do Main Street investment. If you want to invest in a small business in Sioux Falls or buy an Airbnb with retirement money you have, you can’t use your capital through those other platforms to do that,” Cowan said.
“We’re very focused on a great client experience, a great digital experience and how can we democratize that for people.”
The average investor using the IRA Financial platform has about $250,000 in an account with IRA Financial and between 30 percent and 50 percent of their investments in alternatives.
“We’re very Sioux Falls-centric,” Cowan added. “The heartbeat of the company is Sioux Falls.”
He splits his time between Sioux Falls, Connecticut and his native Texas.
“I’ve been very impressed,” Cowan said. “It’s clear what a vibrant community the business community is. I stay downtown a lot and there’s music every weekend night, and walking Phillips (Avenue) you can see how much focus has been on the last 20 to 30 years on having a vibrant downtown. Those things don’t happen by accident.”
The IRA Financial team has grown to more than 90 people, with most of them based in the Sioux Falls office. It’s located in a building at 5109 S. Broadband Lane that used to be part of Pathward.
“We were packed into a couple small office suites and we had an opportunity to get into this to enable growth,” Northrup said. “I think we’re in a good position to be able to move forward.”
Much of the talent is homegrown, including recent interns who moved into full-time roles and employees who came from other fintech roles in Sioux Falls. Others relocated from as far as California.
“I would say we’re reasonably stable for staffing,” Northrup said.
Roles generally are tech-focused, though there also are team members working in account and custodial setup, audit-proofing, operations and client services.
“We believe in having someone to talk to,” Cowan said. “This is not just a website to go to.”
Culturally, IRA Financial is committed to supporting the Sioux Falls community, Northrup said. It received a Sioux Empire United Way Business of the Year award this year.
“We were at 80 percent giving rate year one,” Northrup said. “We’re committed to things like United Way, the Heart Association, different things locally and volunteer things we do, and it’s exciting because we always get strong support.”
The company has strong growth aspirations, including reaching 100,000 active accounts, Cowan said.
“We’re not talking about growing 10 or 15 percent a year,” he said. “The more people know about this space, it’s a great answer for a lot of investors and we need to do the best we can to explain the opportunity. We think there’s potential to be much larger as a company.”
Education will be a focus, he added.
“The more people know about it, they’re like, ‘I should do this. It’s a no-brainer.’ And we think of our job as helping people learn about it, and when they compare us to their options we tend to do pretty well in that conversation,” he said. “I think there’s nearly $18 trillion in investment and retirement accounts, and we are a small, small fraction of that. And I think there’s real potential to grow.”