Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw
by kumar_abhirup | 2026-03-09 14:55:42+00:00
Hi everyone, I am Kumar, co-founder of Dench (https://denchclaw.com). We were part of YC S24, an agentic workflow company that previously worked with sales floors automating niche enterprise tasks such as outbound calling, legal intake, etc.

Building consumer / power-user software always gave me more joy than FDEing into an enterprise. It did not give me joy to manually add AI tools to a cloud harness for every small new thing, at least not as much as completely local software that is open source and has all the powers of OpenClaw (I can now talk to my CRM on Telegram!).

A week ago, we launched Ironclaw, an Open Source OpenClaw CRM Framework (https://x.com/garrytan/status/2023518514120937672?s=20) but people confused us with NearAI’s Ironclaw, so we changed our name to DenchClaw (https://denchclaw.com).

OpenClaw today feels like early React: the primitive is incredibly powerful, but the patterns are still forming, and everyone is piecing together their own way to actually use it. What made React explode was the emergence of frameworks like Gatsby and Next.js that turned raw capability into something opinionated, repeatable, and easy to adopt.

That is how we think about DenchClaw. We are trying to make it one of the clearest, most practical, and most complete ways to use OpenClaw in the real world.

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfACTbc3Bh4#t=43

npx denchclaw

It has a CRM focus because we asked a couple dozen hard-core OpenClaw users "what do you actually do", and it was sales automation, lead enrichment, biz dev, creating slides, linkedin outreach, email/notion/calendar stuff, and it's always painful to set up.

But I use DenchClaw daily for almost everything I do. It also works as a coding agent like Cursor - DenchClaw built DenchClaw. I am addicted now that I can ask it, “hey in the companies table only show me the ones who have more than 5 employees” and it updates it live than me having to manually add a filter.

On Dench, everything sits in a file system, the table filters, views, column toggles, calendar/gantt views, etc, so OpenClaw can directly work with it using Dench’s CRM skill.

The CRM is built on top of DuckDB, the smallest, most performant and at the same time also feature rich database we could find. Thank you DuckDB team!

It creates a new OpenClaw profile called “dench”, and opens a new OpenClaw Gateway… that means you can run all your usual openclaw commands by just prefixing every command with `openclaw --profile dench` . It will start your gateway on port 19001 range. You will be able to access the DenchClaw frontend at localhost:3100. Once you open it on Safari, just add it to your Dock to use it as a PWA.

Think of it as Cursor for your Mac (also works on Linux and Windows) which is based on OpenClaw. DenchClaw has a file tree view for you to use it as an elevated finder tool to do anything on your mac. I use it to create slides, do linkedin outreach using MY browser.

DenchClaw finds your Chrome Profile and copies it fully into its own, so you won’t have to log in into all your websites again. DenchClaw sees what you see, does what you do. It’s an everything app, that sits locally on your mac.

Just ask it “hey import my notion”, “hey import everything from my hubspot”, and it will literally go into your browser, export all objects and documents and put it in its own workspace that you can use.

We would love you all to break it, stress test its CRM capabilities, how it streams subagents for lead enrichment, hook it into your Apollo, Gmail, Notion and everything there is. Looking forward to comments/feedback!