PropTech startup Vontive launches with $135M in funding to transform real estate investing

According to a 2021 report released by MSCI, the size of the professionally managed global real estate investment market increased from $9.6 trillion in 2019 to $10.5 trillion in 2020.

For far too long, the real estate investment market has been dominated by big companies and deep-pocket investors. Now, one prop-tech startup is on a mission to level the playing field by making it possible for average investors to participate.

Enter Vontive, a San Francisco-based tech that is empowering more investors to participate in real estate investing. The company offers a bank-quality mortgage through a no-code, white-label solution that is entirely new and unique. With Vontive, any bank, credit union, property technology company, or B2C brand serving real estate investors can now launch its own investment-property mortgage business in less than a week.

Today, Vontive announced its official launch with $135M in Series B funding to provide the first embedded mortgage platform for investment real estate. The round, which includes venture capital and debt financing, was led by Zigg Capital, with participation from other Vontive investors including Founders Fund, Goldcrest, XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC, Nine Four Ventures, Village Global, Godfrey Capital, and the LeFrak Organization.

“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. “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.”

Funding will be used to expand Vontive’s engineering team, scale B2C partners on the Vontive platform, extend mortgage product offerings, and create its debt marketplace in which financial institutions supply liquidity and receive a safe yield on their assets.

Since its founding, Vontive has quietly built out its platform and scaled its customer base while operating largely in stealth mode. The company has experienced approximately 900% annualized growth in gross merchandise value (GMV) and revenue, and it was profitable in 2021. Vontive now makes its platform widely available.

The Vontive platform enables any business to easily provide quality mortgages that create liquidity for real estate investors. In doing so, it opens up new revenue streams for companies previously put off from extending into the investment mortgage space.

Prior to Vontive, a company that wanted to move into the investment mortgage business had to build a solution themselves, which would entail licensing in multiple states, hiring an entire team to process and underwrite loans, and arranging a balance sheet with equity and warehouse financing behind it. Companies would also have to build relationships with financial institutions to which they could sell their mortgages, as well as cobble together or build onto their own technology in order to automate all of these activities. Such a process would typically take many months and millions of dollars in startup costs to launch even the most basic line of business. Vontive, by contrast, delivers a white-label, bolt-on, no-code solution that is embedded right into an existing app or website; its technology deploys in an afternoon, and Vontive provides the liquidity to finance mortgages. Within a few days to weeks, companies can offer point-of-sale mortgages.

“In a matter of hours, the Vontive team got us set up, embedding a fantastic white-label solution into our existing site,” said Pace Morby, star of A&E’s Triple-Digit Flip. “After some training, our group began marketing these mortgage products to real estate investors we know and existing customers we work with through our social media, education, and real-estate investing enterprises. In total, it took us just a few weeks to go from an initial conversation to overseeing a thriving mortgage business. With a traditional lender, even a scaled-down solution would have taken several months to build and deploy, plus the startup costs would have been 40x more expensive.”