A massive VC round, integrations, crypto mortgage offerings and more
This week, commercial real estate technology platform VTS raised a massive financing round led by CBRE. Stewart Information Services named a new CIO. Snapdocs is integrating with a tech partner to improve mortgage closings. Truv and Xactus are linking up to improve verification of income and employment data. The fintech Staircase launched a new tech tool. Milo debuted two new crypto mortgage offerings.
VTS
VTS, developer of a commercial real estate technology platform, raised $125 million in a massive Series E financing round.
CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm and a VTS customer, led the funding round. The company is providing $100 million of capital and is also joining the VTS board of directors.
Read more: Mortgage tech news roundup: Sept. 2
BentallGreenOak, AmTrust, Brookfield Ventures and Insight Venture Partners also participated in the investment round.
Beyond the capital investment, CBRE will partner with VTS to roll out its VTS platform – starting in the US - for its agency leasing and property management teams. The partnership is meant to deepen the existing relationship between VTS and CBRE.
Nick Romito, CEO of VTS, said in prepared remarks that the company has evolved over the last two years from a single-product company to a multi-product platform that serves everyone from landlord to broker and tenant.
“This infusion of capital lets us double down there, allowing our customers to offer a completely tailored property experience to their tenants across their entire portfolios,” Romito said.
Stewart
Stewart Information Services Corp. named John Hamm as chief information officer for its global technology operations.
Hamm will oversee the company’s technology development and strategy. Stewart is a global real estate services company focused on areas including residential and commercial title insurance, closing and settlement services and specialized offerings for the mortgage industry.
Previously, Hamm was vice president of information technology at Texas Children’s Hospital, where he led the transformation of their patient digital experience. He handled overall strategic vision, maturity, and operations of the electronic health record, electronic resources planning and enterprise integration of more than 300 critical applications.
Hamm has more than 25 years of experience leading IT transformation, along with M&A experience at global Fortune 500 and enterprise non-profit organizations.
Stewart is based in Houston.
Snapdocs
Snapdocs is integrating with Byte Software to deliver more efficient mortgage closings at scale.
Snapdocs is a digital closing platform and Byte is a mortgage software company focused on loan origination technology.
The integration lets lenders use Snapdocs within Byte’s loan origination system with a goal of streamlining and automating the closer process. Reducing costs and improving the borrower experience is also a target of the integration.
Snapdocs’ open platform and partnerships with all major real estate technology providers gives lenders access to AI and the ability to automate time-sensitive, error-prone tasks. They can also connect with the largest settlement network and get to full digital closing adoption.
Truv/Xactus
Truv and Xactus are linking up to broaden the reach of technology that helps mortgage lenders verify income and employment data.
Truv, formerly known as Citidel API, provides safe and reliable API connections to payroll accounts to enable income and employment verification for lenders. Xactus is a mortgage verification technology company.
As part of their arrangement, Xactus’ verification capabilities will be augmented with Truv’s consumer-permissioned data approach to income and employment data.
By doing so, mortgage lenders will be able to verify income and employment data for more than 146 million US employees covering over 85% of the US workforce.
Staircase
The fintech Staircase launched a new tech tool designed to let originators target and engage motivated borrowers who self-qualify online.
Staircase has developed an API and low-code marketplace that automates complex technologies and makes them self-serve for the US residential mortgage industry.
Read next: Mortgage tech news roundup: August 26
The new tool – Leads Curation – is a feature of the company’s PreApproval tool, and is intended to help mortgage originators target specific borrowers to meet their goals and capture more business. PreApproval provides lenders with a template they can use to create a customized, white-labeled web and mobile-enabled pre-approval application process for their borrowers in 30 minutes.
The cost of using the new Leads Curation feature is $50 per loan application, the company said.
Milo
Milo said it has launched two new crypto mortgage offerings.
The fintech company unveiled a new refinance option that lets borrowers access US dollars by pledging their crypto assets and property to cash out up to 100% of their property’s home equity value. Borrowers, using this crypto refinance products, can use the cash proceeds from the property to pay off existing debt, repurchase crypto or invest in other assets.
Milo’s second new product is an undercollateralized crypto mortgage backed by USDC or tokenized US dollar. It lets customers borrow all of the property’s value by pledging 40% of the loan amount in USDC.
