Layoffs, new financing, partnerships and more
In this week’s roundup: Homebuying fintech Knock will lay off nearly half of its staff after raising new financing in the wake of aborted IPO plans. Roostify and ICE Mortgage Technology are partnering on improving the digital closing experience. LOANtuitive has emerged from stealth mode. Canopy Financial Technologies and Liquid Mortgage will jointly provide a due diligence and digital asset life-of-loan product. Ocrolus rolled out a new roster of document-centric applications for Encompass.
Knock
Knock, a proptech and homebuying fintech, is bringing in $220 million of new financing designed in part to help it reach profitability after abandoning attempts to go public.
The company will also be slashing its workforce by about 46% because its new financing is much less than it had hoped to raise in an initial public offering, co-founder and CEO Sean Black said in prepared remarks.
The new funding includes a first close on $70 million in equity and $150 million in new debt in a round led by Foundry Group. Existing investors First American Financial and RRE Ventures also participated.
A number of new investors also joined in, including the National Association of Realtors, director and producer M Night Shyamalan and Mauricio Umansky, co-founder of luxury real estate brokerage The Agency.
The company announced plans more than a year to hit the public markets. Knock said it changed course after trends such as the SPAC market disintegrating, two COVID outbreaks, investor turmoil and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Knock’s core products include its Home Swap product, which offers a fully integrated mortgage and as much as $650,000 in an interest-free bridge loan to cover the down payment on the new home, and up to six months of mortgage payments on the old home.
Knock claims to now have a presence in 75 markets nationally, up from about 14 a little more than a year ago.
Roostify/ICE Mortgage Technology
Mortgage technology provider Roostify has partnered with ICE Mortgage Technology to improve the digital closing experience.
ICE Mortgage Technology, part of Intercontinental Exchange Inc., provides data, technology and market infrastructure.
Neither side is disclosing financial terms.
Their team-up will help boost Roostify’s bi-directional integration with Encompass, the companies said in their release.
Plans call for integrating ICE Mortgage Technology’s eClose product into Roostify’s digital home lending platform, allowing for a seamless system-to-system delivery of preliminary and closing disclosures for e-sign in real time.
LOANtuitive
LOANtuitive, a B2B commercial real estate debt marketplace start-up, has emerged from stealth mode.
Stealth mode for start-ups involves operating below the radar while fine-tuning key software and concepts before debuting for the general public.
The Seattle-based company was founded in 2020 by a team of commercial real estate and technology entrepreneurs. LOANtuitive’s platform uses SaaS concepts and machine learning so commercial mortgage brokers can collect, evaluate and place loan requests with lenders.
CEO and co-founder Dave Siegfried asserts that his company’s platform will reduce “transactional complexity and bias” within the mortgage industry.
“Rather than removing brokers from a transaction, LOANtuitive is focused on supercharging brokers with modern technology to increase efficiency and remove the opaqueness that surrounds all parties when financing commercial real estate,” Siegfried said in prepared remarks.
Canopy and Liquid Mortgage
Canopy Financial Technologies and Liquid Mortgage are partnering to provide a due diligence and digital asset life-of-loan product.
Their arrangement calls for integrating Canopy’s due diligence product with Liquid Mortgage’s digital asset offering. The combination is designed to give loan investors and securities issuers the ability to attach due diligence reporting and data directly to a loan-based digital asset on a blockchain.
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By doing so, this reporting will stay with the digital asset for the life of the loan, in a way that’s verifiable and transparent. In addition, Liquid Mortgage will allow borrower payment tracking immediately once the digital asset is created, so investors can get more timely loan performance data.
The companies expect to have the first loan-backed digital assets with full due diligence in the 2022 second quarter.
Ocrolus
Document automation platform start-up Ocrolus rolled out a new roster of document-centric applications for Encompass. The company said the applications are designed to reduce mortgage approval process delays due to review queues.
The company debuted its new product suite during the ICE Experience 2022 conference in Las Vegas on March 14.
Ocrolus said the new software will help reduce loan approval times, simplify the integration process with ICE Encompass, boost document accuracy and make the end-user experience more inclusive.
Specifically, the Ocrolus Encompass integration includes three new applications for document automation and data capture.
“Prolonged mortgage approval cycles are an anachronism in the age of fintech lending,” Suzanne Ross, Ocrolus’s director of product, mortgage, said. “The Ocrolus Encompass integration accelerates the entire mortgage workflow… for fast and informed decision making.”
