Vontive has raised $135 million in Series B venture capital and debt. Zigg Capital led the round, with Founders Fund, 8VC, XYZ Venture Capital, Goldcrest, Nine Four Ventures, Village Global, Godfrey Capital, and the LeFrak organization participating.
It's also the first time Vontive has said much of anything in public.
Four quiet years
Vontive was founded in late 2017. For the next four years, the company mostly kept its head down and built.
The silence was on purpose. Lending is a business where claims are cheap and results take time. Vontive wanted real loans on the books, real borrowers served, and real economics proven before asking anyone to pay attention.
The problem
Investment property lending in the U.S. is a market of roughly $2 trillion of loans outstanding and $300 billion of new lending per year. Yet the 25 biggest lenders hold less than 20% of it. The rest is spread across thousands of small lenders, each with its own forms, its own rules, and its own way of pricing risk.
That's hard on everyone. Borrowers wait weeks for a closing and often end up paying hard-money rates. Big institutions that want to invest in these loans can't easily do it, because every loan looks different and has to be reviewed by hand. It's one of the last large credit markets in the country without a common standard.
Built as software first
Vontive's founders came at that problem from an unusual angle. Shreyas Vijaykumar was one of Palantir's earliest engineers. Charles McKinney spent his career in credit and capital markets at Freddie Mac. They met when Palantir and Freddie Mac worked together on mortgage credit losses during the housing crisis, a project that was all about turning messy loan data into something people could reason about.
So when they started Vontive, they started with the data. Before writing a single loan, they designed how every loan would be represented: the borrower, the property, every document, every decision, and the evidence behind each one.
From there, software took on the work that usually buries a loan team. It reads incoming documents and pulls out the numbers, so nobody retypes a bank statement. It checks each figure against its source. It runs underwriting procedures the same way every time, and it hands a credit expert a file that's already assembled and verified. People still make every credit decision. They just spend their time on judgment instead of data entry.
And because every loan lands in the same structure, each one makes the next one easier. The system gets a little more informed with every file it sees.
What that means for borrowers and brands
For borrowers, loans close 80–90% faster than at a bank, without hard-money pricing.
For the brands they already trust (banks, credit unions, proptech companies, and the many other businesses that serve real estate investors), Vontive means offering mortgages at the point of sale in a matter of weeks. Building that from scratch usually takes many months and significant startup costs.
For institutions with capital to deploy, Vontive is a direct, standardized way into an asset class that's been hard to reach. Borrowers, brands, and capital all work from the same data.
Zigg Capital put it well when it backed the company: standardizing how credit flows takes a rare mix of software engineering, credit risk expertise, and capital markets knowledge. That mix is the whole founding story.
Where the money goes
The new capital funds four things: more engineers, more brands offering Vontive mortgages, more loan products, and the infrastructure that lets financial institutions put capital to work in real estate credit directly.
Thank you
Thanks to the investors who believed in Vontive before there was anything public to point to. Thanks to Colchis Capital and the other institutions that trusted Vontive as a home for their capital. And thanks to the brands that built lending businesses on the platform before anyone knew its name.
Institutions looking to invest in real estate credit, brands whose customers build, own, or invest in property, and engineers and credit professionals who want to join can reach Vontive at vontive.com.
Media contact: media@vontive.com
Press coverage
- Vontive wants to be the Palantir of real estate investing — TechCrunch, April 7, 2022
- Vontive Series B announcement — Business Wire, April 2022
- Investment-mortgage fintech Vontive scores $135 million in funding — National Mortgage News
- Vontive nabs $135M for embeddable real estate investor loan platform — Inman, April 11, 2022
- Vontive launches no-code mortgage platform with $135M in funding — Built In