Startup provides embedded services through retail partners
Vontive’s centerpiece is an embedded mortgage platform for investment real estate. The company acts as a mortgage lender in a white-label scenario for the partners it embeds with.
“We’re a vertical embedded mortgage or investment mortgage solution,” explained Shreyas Vijaykumar (pictured), Vontive’s chief technology officer and co-founder. “For the partner, we’re providing the application that the borrower fills out, and their borrower experience. We’re also providing the mortgage operations and will underwrite the mortgage and also fund [it].”
Established late 2017 and now with approximately 80 employees, Vontive made a public debut in April with the launch of its embedded mortgage platform. The company at that time announced it had raised $135 million in venture capital and debt financing. Its platform is the core around which multiple business objectives revolve, Vijaykumar said.
“Vontive is an investment mortgage platform connecting borrowers who need investment or mortgage financing to retail institutions that can offer that financing, and capital markets partners who want to own credit product,” Vijaykumar said. “We’re a mortgage company but not a consumer mortgage company, so we focus exclusively on investment purposes, business purposes [and] mortgage fulfillment.”
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Vontive’s customers are retail partners, or retail brands who count real estate investors or users of business purpose financing as their customers in some way.
The company views mortgages as a commodity that should be distributed through brands that the end customer trusts and already works with.
“By offering a white label solution through retail brands, the end customer gets debt from a place that they already do business with,” Vijaykumar said.
In other words, the partners embed Vontive into their systems, and then white label the company’s mortgage business they market to end users.
Partners
One such partner is PadSplit, a rent-by-the-room venture-backed marketplace that offers clean, modern furnished rooms for rent to community members at an affordable weekly fee. The site has hosts who put properties on the platform and others looking to rent rooms. Vijaykumar noted that PadSplit carriers a mortgage option for people who bring real estate onto the platform who want to explore a PadSplit mortgage. Vontive is the fulfillment company behind that.
Vontive also partners with Fixated Funding, an asset-based lender that helps real estate investors close deals and is based in the Pacific Northwest. That company has launched a mortgage arm and Vontive serves as the fulfillment entity.
Vontive funds mortgages using its own balance sheet and then manages the risks. At this point the company has forged 30 partners, with plans to grow the partner base further over the course of the year and beyond, Vijaykumar said.
Multi-tenancy and other tech elements
Vontive’s cloud-based technology is driven by four major concepts, Vijaykumar said.
The first is something known as “multi-tenancy,” the idea that multiple, isolated, segregated businesses can live on one piece of hardware without any contamination between the hardware “tenants.”
“Tenants, in our context, mean our retail partner businesses,” Vijaykumar said. “The software they use to manage their businesses that we enable can be turned on through code rather than a deployment or installation per partner.”
As a result, Vontive can “turn on” a new partner in about 15 minutes.
The second pillar involves Vontive’s data foundation, and how it organizes documents and structured data elements that go into a mortgage file. Those elements range from title commitments to purchase contracts, insurance binders, APIs, valuation services, credit services and more.
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“There’s a version of lending where the output is a cardboard box filled with documents that you have to go through and read to analyze the credit product,” Vijaykumar said. “What we’re trying to do is say, around a format like that, we’re going to essentially develop a standard that absorbs all the information around a mortgage” that, in combination, can simplify the process for partners’ customers who want to purchase mortgages.
Decision science is also a major component, something that Vijaykumar said can enable ideal optimization of the pricing part of the collateral assessment of the borrower. Plans call for building out data product services in this area to help Vontive better underwrite and price investment mortgages.
The fourth pillar focuses on industry workflows in general.
“A mortgage company is really like a factory, and if you can optimize your factory and have people doing high value work and not low value work, you can be fundamentally more efficient,” Vijaykumar said. “The mortgage factory is fairly complicated, and we’ve done a lot to streamline that for our internal operations team.”
