Deloitte named Vontive the 2nd fastest growing fintech and 10th fastest growing startup in North America. Our press release is available here.
When we were asked to apply, and when we submitted our tax returns and audited financial statements, we did not contemplate achieving Deloitte’s recognition. We are thankful and would like to reflect on how we got here.
An Idea Born in the U.S. Housing Crisis
Our founders met when Palantir built a data platform for Freddie Mac to manage its credit losses. One of the strategies priced hundreds of thousands of homes sold to real estate investors. Vontive was born from asking how real estate investors financed their purchases and learning why they paid an exorbitant price for debt. There was neither a mortgage-finance system with capital markets that provide reliable liquidity nor technology that empowers predictable mortgage delivery.
Under the Radar for Many Years
When we started Vontive in late 2017, we were fortunate to win the backing of leading venture investors and create partnerships with impressive financial institutions. Along our journey, they observed our vision of end-to-end financial technology for real estate investors get built and adopted. In comparison to many startups, Vontive has not been a well-known name. We focused on building the company, shied away from social media, and just recently began publicizing ourselves. For example, after Founders Fund led our Series A, one of our software engineers complained because we did not issue a press release.
The Embedded Mortgage is the Start of our Growth
Conventional mortgage has mature software companies, capital markets, loan products, data standards, and lenders with substantial market share. The mortgage market for real estate investors in residential properties is immature in all respects.
We fixate on two questions: How do we efficiently build software that transforms bespoke offline transactions into standard digital products? How do we distribute that technology into a fragmented market? Building our software has taken years of hard work by talented engineers, and we are not yet close to being done, given the surface area of taking an application, underwriting credit, manufacturing a loan, and servicing debt. Empowering trusted B2C brands to bolt Vontive mortgages onto their business has fueled our growth, and we are just getting started.
Embedding our technology and creating digital connective infrastructure will create interesting opportunities for Vontive and our partners. Vertically, we can add financial products and equip our B2C partners to deepen their customer relationships. Horizontally, we can apply our technology to solving adjacent problems for capital partners (e.g., giving financial institutions much better insights to manage their risk exposure and intelligence in the form of our Vontive Score).
Impact of Rising Interest Rates and a Soft Housing Market
Like every other company in the real-estate market, Vontive is not immune to the impact of the housing market transition from hot to cold. We invest in understanding economic and housing trends, including our proprietary surveys of real estate investors and consumer households. We hope the upcoming time of adversity will shape Vontive to be one of the great success stories of our era.
