Investment-mortgage fintech Vontive scores $135 million in funding

Vontive, a mortgage platform aimed at streamlining investor real estate transactions, announced it had secured $135 million in Series B capital as it aims to scale operations.

Funding for the round was led by Zigg Capital, with additional backing from Founders Fund, Goldcrest, XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC, Nine Four Ventures, Village Global, Godfrey Capital and the LeFrak organization. The latest raise consists of $110 million in debt financing and $25 million in cash, according to Crunchbase.

The company, with headquarters in both San Francisco and Seattle, has designed a platform intended to enable the flow of capital so that any business-to-consumer lending business can start offering investment-property mortgages.

Vontive’s white-label solution, which can be embedded on a company’s app or website, is expected to ease the process of introducing investment-mortgage lending by using artificial intelligence to reduce the personnel, paperwork and time typically involved when starting this kind of unit. Vontive aims to be the “connective tissue” linking capital providers to banks, credit unions and proptech companies originating the loans.

“Leading financial institutions want exposure to U.S. real estate, and appetite to finance investment mortgages dwarfs their ability to efficiently allocate capital,” said Charles McKinney, co-founder and CEO of Vontive, in a press release.

“Unlike mature fixed-income markets, these institutions cannot electronically allocate capital through digital systems,” he added.

Founded in 2017 by McKinney, previously an executive at Freddie Mac, and Shreyas Vijaykumar, a former engineer for Palantir who serves as Vontive’s chief technology officer, the fintech began operations one year later. The two men met when Palantir partnered with Freddie Mac to build technology for mortgage credit-loss management during the U.S. housing crisis. Vontive said it turned a profit in 2021.

“We believe the real estate investment mortgage will ultimately migrate to platforms that standardize the flow of credit from capital providers to borrowers through trusted brands,” said Ryan Orley, general partner at Zigg Capital, about the firm’s backing of Vontive. “Building such a platform requires an unusual combination of software engineering expertise, credit risk fluency, and capital markets knowledge.”

Vontive said it plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team, add new partners to the platform, increase mortgage product offerings and create a debt marketplace for financial institutions to supply liquidity.

Vontive’s announcement comes weeks after digital lender Beeline embarked on a partnership with property-management platform Stessa to provide mortgages to its single-family investor clients. Recent data from Redfin showed the investment market coming in strong at the end of last year, but some politicians also blame it for the dearth of single-family housing available on the surge in such purchases.