We’re delighted to announce our newest investment in Vontive’s $25M Series B led by Zigg Capital. Nine Four Ventures is excited to partner with Charles, Shreyas, and the Vontive team to build a category defining embedded mortgage fulfillment platform for individual and institutional SFR and small commercial investors. Here is a bit more about the business, opportunity, and why we invested.
Vontive is an embedded mortgage fulfillment platform that supports a wide variety of financing products including mortgages, renovation loans, and construction loans to single family rental (“SFR”) and small commercial investors. It offers its products directly to investors and embeds itself within a fast-growing number of online platforms such as brokerage, marketplace, fix-and-flip or rent-to-own alternatives. Vontive subsequently underwrites buyers faster (in minutes, not days) and at more attractive terms compared to existing options, and provides an integrated end-to-end experience that increases conversions on platforms, resulting in higher NPS, increased transaction volume, and more revenue.
Vontive was born out of Charles and Shreyas’ previous experiences working at Freddie Mac and Palantir, respectively. Charles was leading a ten-figure loan portfolio and in charge of reducing defaults and keeping owners in their homes. As part of that initiative, Charles had hired Shreyas’ team at Palantir to build technology to support that strategy and it was the beginning of a decades-long friendship and business partnership. While working together in that capacity for several years they both observed the evolution of the market and noticed the lack of standardization of investment mortgages compared to conventional mortgages. The process was slow, expensive, and opaque and creating a lot of challenges for an increasing number of SFR investors throughout the application lifecycle. That’s when they decided to leave their jobs, team up, and build modern financial infrastructure for the investment mortgage space.
From watching the record-breaking amount of capital flowing into the SFR market through our investments in Inspectify and Bungalow, we were well aware of the overlooked and underestimated challenges associated with fulfilling investment mortgages and renovation loans. As a result, when we learned about Vontive and met Charles and Shreyas it immediately became clear that we shared a common vision for the future, this was exactly what the industry needs, and they are the best people to build it. We also noticed that the cloud-native, integrated technology platform they had built over the previous three years was unique, differentiated, and positioned them better than anyone else. It’s TurboTax-like workflow 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. Vontive subsequently grades applications using its proprietary underwriting algorithm and runs them through the “buy boxes” of capital markets partners on the back end. Their streamlined approach allows investors to deploy more capital faster without sacrificing compliance, and has led to many repeat buyers and subsequent impressive growth. We believe any investor not using Vontive in the future will be at a major disadvantage.
Although they’ve come so far in such a short period of time, there’s so much left to build. If you’re an online platform interested in embedding Vontive to improve conversions or a SFR investor looking to increase the speed of capital deployment, please reach out! If you want to contribute to the development of a game-changing platform for investment mortgages, Vontive is hiring!
Congrats again to Charles, Shreyas and the entire Vontive team!
