Startup Pylon raised $8.5 million in its seed round to build a mortgage-as-a-service platform for fintechs, banks and retail banks.
Conversion Capital led the funding with participation from Fifth Wall, Peter Thiel, QED Investors, Montage Ventures, and Village Global as well as Ramp, Blend, Zillow, SoFi and Figure, the company announced.
Headquartered and founded by Trent Hedge and Marco Monteiro earlier this year, the firm’s unified stack offers a white-labeled interface that can pre-fill loan applications in addition to instantly verifying income, assets and pulling credit, according to its website.
The built-in underwriting logic aims to deliver quick and accurate decisions to borrowers with maximum affordability approvals and automated tasking. Pylon’s capital market stack will also provide a variety of loan products at competitive rates with pre-arranged debt capital, the company said.
The product is currently deployed with early design partner customers via a private beta, and Pylon plans to use the funding for product development and talent recruitment.
Analogous to the banking-as-a-service industry with the rise of developer-first infrastructure, the goal for Pylon is to integrate mortgage-as-a-service for its customers.
Mortgages are rapidly becoming commoditized across rates, loan products and operations, as indicated by nearly identical rates among the top 10 lenders, Trent Hedge said in a statement. Hedge also noted the need for software to standardize these commodities.
“We are long overdue for the infrastructure layer that standardizes these commodities through software – allowing our customers to focus on building highly differentiated, revenue-generating mortgage offerings at a fraction of the time and cost,” Hedge said.