SaaS model eliminates redundancies and automates loan origination for faster, more efficient and transparent borrower and lender experiences
Vesta, a mortgage loan origination system software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, today announced a $30 million Series A investment led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from new investor Zigg Capital. Seed investors Conversion Capital and Bain Capital Ventures also funded the round, bringing the company’s total raised since November 2020 to $35 million. The round will help accelerate efforts to achieve its mission to enable a seamless, transparent experience for financial institutions and their customers through an intelligent, opinionated, and intuitive workflow platform. The fresh capital will fuel Vesta’s aggressive hiring plans and expansion of its SaaS technology to customer environments.
Vesta is building the infrastructure that will power the next generation of financial services, starting with the backbone of the mortgage industry, the loan origination system. The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) forecasts there will be upwards of $2.59 trillion in loan originations in 2022, yet loan origination systems (LOS) struggle to keep pace. Despite a steady increase in spending on automation software - a global market expected to reach $6.1 billion by 2026 - today's mortgage process is inefficient, slowed down by a reliance on paper-based documentation, antiquated technologies, highly manual operations and redundant information sharing.
“Amidst the pandemic in 2020, first-time homeowners and refinancing demand drove home loan origination numbers to all-time record highs and highlighted the need to acquire and serve customers digitally,” said Vesta founder and CEO, Mike Yu. “The significantly increased volume uncovered how inflexible, antiquated and painfully slow the traditional mortgage process can be and challenged the status quo. Today, as the market contracts, this shift to digital-first loan origination will accelerate. Lenders are motivated more than ever to invest in technologies that open and speed up the process to better serve borrowers, improve margins, and unlock new services. Vesta is modernizing the infrastructure that is the underpinning of the journey to homeownership and beyond.”
Vesta’s SaaS model expedites the lending process by delivering a consistent, reliable multi-channel platform spanning each step of the origination process, from when a borrower applies for a loan, through application processing, to the disbursement of funds. Vesta’s platform eliminates redundancies, reduces compliance risk and enables lenders to understand, measure and improve their origination processes. It includes:
- System of record for loan origination data and documents that is fault tolerant, performant, and fully audited
- Customizable workflow engine that orchestrates the origination process across the many parties involved: borrowers, loan officers, processors, underwriters, and other settlement providers
- Open APIs and ecosystem enabling lenders to choose their partners or build their own point solutions
“While there’s a lot of excitement and investment going into banking and mortgage technology, the industry still lacks a consistent engine to orchestrate and standardize loan origination. It’s about change management as much as anything else because replacing the existing process is hard. It requires the technical and financial know-how to develop and implement a new backbone in a highly-regulated industry,” said newly-appointed Vesta board member Angela Strange, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “All the players – banks, brokers and title agents – agree that a new system is needed, but to date no one has successfully built it. Vesta’s team understands the depth of the problem and is technically adept to solve it. The infrastructure they are creating will be a core driver to automation and adoption in the industry.”
Vesta was co-founded in 2020 by Mike Yu and Devon Yang, who met while working together at Blend, the multibillion-dollar mortgage software company powering billions in U.S. home loan originations. Yang was Blend’s first engineering hire and led all platforms and integrations for the now-public company. Yu played a critical role in product launches including Blend’s installation with Wells Fargo and the company’s Day 1 certainty product with Fannie Mae. The positions they held across engineering, product, and design exposed them to the significant constraints of the current mortgage infrastructure, which has failed to keep up with the pace of change in more digitally native industries. They applied this first-hand experience in how to build next generation mortgage software, attract top technical talent, and successfully sell into the largest U.S. banks to create Vesta. Additional Vesta team members have prior experience spanning Brex, Uber, EarnUp, and other financial technology startups. The company is scaling its team, with planned hiring for additional engineering and product development talent.
ABOUT VESTA
Vesta is a provider of a SaaS platform for mortgage loan origination software, connecting banks, credit unions, mortgage bankers and brokers. The technology provides a customizable platform for mortgage origination, supporting approval, underwriting, closing and funding of home loans. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, the company was founded by early Blend employees Mike Yu and Devon Yang in 2020. Investors backing Vesta include: Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Conversion Capital, Index Ventures and Zigg Capital. For more information, visit: www.usevesta.com
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Kerry Walker
Walker Communications
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