Mortgage startup Pylon secures funding from Peter Thiel, Fifth Wall

Pylon, a New York-based fintech that offers an embedded infrastructure platform to help companies introduce mortgage products, announced it had secured a seed capital raise with support from several high-profile names, including Peter Thiel and private equity firm Fifth Wall. 

Conversion Capital led the round, which totaled $8.5 million, with participation from Thiel, Fifth Wall, QED Investors, Montage Ventures, and Village Global. Funding also came from angel investors at Ramp, Blend, Zillow, SoFi and Figure. 

"The Pylon platform unlocks enormous enterprise value and access to the largest asset class in North America. The building blocks and technology now exist to offer the first fully embeddable mortgage product for enterprise companies and their customers," said General Partner Christian Lawless of Conversion Capital in a press release.

Founded earlier this year by Trent Hedge and Marco Monteiro, Pylon is attempting to build a platform incorporating all capabilities across the loan life cycle, including origination, underwriting, regulatory compliance and capital markets. The software would allow fintechs, proptechs and other businesses to launch mortgage products.

"Mortgages are rapidly becoming commoditized across rates, loan products and operations as indicated by the nearly identical rates amongst the top 10 lenders," Hedge said. "We are long overdue for the infrastructure layer that standardizes these commodities through software."

Pylon's platform is currently in development and in the early stages of deployment through a private beta program among early customers from a set of enterprise design partners.

Pylon is not the first venture into the mortgage and housing space for high-profile investor and political contributor Thiel. The co-founder of Paypal and Palantir was among the participants in a 2021 funding round of Generation Home, a United Kingdom-based home lending startup. Thiel has also heavily backed Canadian company Neo Financial Technologies, as it built out its mortgage business. Earlier this year, Thiel led a funding round of proptech startup Ember, a platform aiming to facilitate the process of purchasing or co-owning vacation-home properties. 

Pylon's expansion follows the unveiling of a similar all-inclusive software platform from point-of-sale fintech Maxwell this past spring, which was aimed at businesses seeking to add mortgage lending to their offerings. 

The capital raise also arrives as the mortgage industry finds itself in the throes of a down cycle after record volumes in 2021. New originations have fallen by approximately 65% on an annual basis, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, while lenders and fintechs have let go of scores of employees over the past several months. Several experts have predicted the slowdown to last well into 2023.

At the same time, venture capital funding of proptech and mortgage technology companies has also come in at a quieter and slower pace toward the end of 2022 compared to the prior two years. Last month, servicing platform Haven became the recipient of a Series A raise led by Fifth Wall, while Hometap, Polly and Vontive announced they had secured larger amounts at the beginning of the year.