Vontive nabs $135M for embeddable real estate investor loan platform

Vontive Inc., a startup that’s built an embeddable mortgage platform to provide loans directly to real estate investors, has raised $25 million in venture capital and $110 million in debt in a Series B funding round.

The funding round, led by Zigg Capital, will allow San Francisco-based Vontive to grow its engineering team, add B2C partners to the platform, extend mortgage product offerings, and provide a debt marketplace for financial institutions to provide funding.

Vontive says its embeddable mortgage fulfillment platform enables any bank, credit union, proptech company or brand to offer loan products to single-family rental and small commercial investors, including mortgages, renovation loans, and construction loans.

Previously known as Certain Lending Inc., Vontive was founded as a Delaware corporation in 2017, and raised $8 million in 2019. The company is licensed in five states — Arizona, California, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington — and has three sponsored loan originators, according to the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System.

In announcing the official launch of its platform Thursday, Vontive said that since the company’s founding, it “has quietly built out its platform and scaled its customer base while operating largely in stealth mode.”

The company claims its “white-label, bolt-on, no-code solution” can be embedded into an existing app or website in an afternoon, and envisions that its platform will be adopted by online websites serving real estate investors. Vontive says it uses proprietary technology to underwrite loans “with the same rigor as a bank in a fraction of the time,” with financing provided by liquidity partners like Colchis Capital.

The company says it achieved profitability in 2021, having generated 900 percent annualized growth in gross merchandise value and revenue under the leadership of co-founders Shreyas Vijaykumar and Charles McKinney. Vijaykuma, Vontive’s CTO, is a former Palantir engineer, while CEO McKinney is a former Freddie Mac executive.

Vontive co-founders Shreyas Vijaykumar, left, and Charles McKinney.

“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, in a statement. “Building such a platform requires an unusual combination of software engineering expertise, credit risk fluency, and capital markets knowledge. We are proud to partner with Charles and Shreyas as Vontive continues to establish itself as the best technology partner for the originators of investment mortgages.”

Other companies in mortgage technology and lending backed by Zigg include Snapdocs, Spruce, Valon Mortgage, Habi, Tomo and Vesta.

Vontive’s backers also include Founders Fund, Goldcrest, XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC, Nine Four Ventures, Village Global, Godfrey Capital, and the LeFrak organization.

In a blog post detailing why it invested in Vontive, Nine Four Ventures lauded the platform’s “TurboTax-like workflow,” which “walks investors through the application process step-by-step, automatically prepopulates and verifies bank and credit data, and carries it forward so applicants don’t have to re-enter the same information for future acquisitions.”

After grading applications using a proprietary underwriting algorithm, Vontive runs them through the “buy boxes” of capital markets partners. It’s a streamlined approach that, according to Nine Four Ventures, “allows investors to deploy more capital faster without sacrificing compliance, and has led to many repeat buyers and subsequent impressive growth.”

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Email Matt Carter