The wire instructions looked ordinary, which was precisely the problem. In 2017, a buyer working with the Austin real-estate company where Abigail White was marketing director received a phishing email and nearly sent away a down payment. The fraud lived inside the costume of routine business: a familiar message, an urgent deadline, a bank account waiting at the other end.
That evening Abigail told her husband, Andy. He was a computer engineer accustomed to looking for failure inside complicated systems. Then the couple noticed the embarrassing part. When they had bought their own home, they too had wired their savings to an account they knew only from an email. Nothing bad had happened. Luck had passed for security.
A sensible person might have changed a password and become suspicious of attachments. The Whites started a company.
The engineer meets the closing table
White did not arrive in real estate by the ceremonial route. His education was in computer and electrical engineering at Auburn University, where he earned a bachelor's degree, a master's and a Ph.D. He taught computer systems and parallel processing, published research on speeding matrix computations on graphics processors, and moved into industry as an engineering scientist at KnuEdge and a performance architect at Samsung SARC.
He has said he holds seven patents in computer hardware and software and appears on five more applications. In a 2020 interview, he offered that impressive inventory with a comic wince: his wife made him include it because she was proud, he explained, while he did not take himself too seriously. The exchange captures his useful founder combination. He can go deep into the machine, then return to ordinary language before anybody's eyes glaze over.
Technical rigor underneath. Plain instructions on the surface. A closing product cannot ask an anxious buyer to become a security engineer.
Real-estate settlement gave him a system worthy of disassembly. The transaction has many participants, an unforgiving clock and large sums crossing interfaces built in different eras. Email hands information to a phone call. A fax speaks to a lender portal. A wire carries the money. At every seam, somebody must decide whether the person or account on the other side is genuine.
Closinglock began with a secure alternative to emailing wire instructions. The ambition, in White's early formulation, was simple: every buyer, seller, lender and agent should have a secure and straightforward closing. The platform later followed the transaction outward into identity verification, document sharing, e-signatures, digital payments, two-way messaging, payoff verification and compliance workflows.
“Ultimately, we want to ensure every property buyer, seller, lender and real estate agent has a secure and simple closing.”Andy White, 2020
Nights, weekends and the folding table
For a time, the company existed around White's day job at Samsung. He worked nights and weekends, and spent paid time off traveling to title-industry conferences. One photograph from those years shows Andy and Abigail beside a folding table, a television and an earnest blue banner promising to “put a lock on wire fraud.” Startup mythology prefers garages. Trade-show carpet is less romantic and perhaps more useful.
White's recollection of those events is refreshingly free of founder theatre. He was not brooding over total addressable market. He hoped someone would stop. The people who did became instructors. The founders listened to title professionals describe their work, went home, built what customers requested, then returned to the next event a little better.
The folding table was a product lab. It imposed a valuable discipline: explain the danger without turning every customer into a cybersecurity student. Wire fraud is dramatic after it succeeds. Prevention must work before the drama, when the instruction looks tedious and the user wants to finish.
Trust becomes a management problem
A founder can personally inspect every handoff when the staff consists of two people. Growth ruins that option. White's answer is a leadership style he calls “macro management”: make expectations clear, give people room to own the result and get out of their way. It is an engineer's fondness for defined interfaces applied to humans, with the important concession that humans need meaning as well as specifications.
He speaks of replacing himself in roles as the company grows. Founders often hoard decisions because competence has become tangled with identity. White frames delegation as multiplication. A responsibility handed to a capable owner gives the company more judgment, and pushes the leader toward the work only the leader can do.
His hiring filter follows the same logic. Character, curiosity and grit carry more weight than a perfectly matched résumé. Experience describes what a candidate has seen. A learning mentality suggests what the person can handle next. In a company whose adversary continually changes tactics, the distinction is practical.
Trust is built in small moments, not big promises.White's leadership principle
White also favors transparency about problems, not merely celebration of wins. People can help solve a challenge once they understand it. He still values meeting in person because trust grows faster when colleagues and customers can read the room, ask the awkward follow-up and discover that the person across the table is not a rectangle on a calendar.
Following the awkward work
Closinglock's later products resemble a tour through the least photogenic parts of a closing. Consider mortgage payoffs. A title professional may chase information across emails, phones, faxes and lender portals, then check that a payoff statement and destination account are real. White counted roughly 5,000 lenders, each with its own variation on the process. He saw a candidate for thoughtful automation.
The distinction matters to him. Adding a fashionable chatbot to title-company data does not automatically produce value. Payoff retrieval, by contrast, is tedious, structured enough to assist and costly when done badly. Closinglock acquired technology from Viking Sasquatch in 2025 and introduced automated, verified payoff ordering. White said automation could cut work that took about 75 minutes to seconds, freeing title professionals for the judgment and customer care machines do poorly.
Capital arrived as the scope widened: a $12 million Series A in 2024 and a $34 million Series B led by Sageview Capital in January 2025, with Headline and RWT Horizons participating. Closinglock reported more than one million protected home sales and $500 billion in transaction value around that period. It placed No. 44 on Deloitte's 2025 Technology Fast 500, which recorded 2,751 percent growth. By the company's ninth anniversary in 2026, White said it had protected more than two million buyers and sellers.
The numbers mark scale; the origin story supplies the unit that matters. Each transaction belongs to somebody who has spent years accumulating what can disappear in minutes. White has said that every stopped fraud attempt reinforces why the company began. It is a founder's metric with a face behind it.
The adventure and the guardrail
Abigail has described her husband as adventurous and inclined to treat entrepreneurship as a problem to solve. His father owns an electrical engineering firm, so self-employment did not appear exotic to him. Abigail found the prospect more daunting. Their temperaments became a balancing mechanism: when one was frustrated, the other could lift the mood.
They were also connected to the human stakes beyond their product. White spoke publicly about Closinglock supporting Community First! Village, an Austin community offering housing and support, and about occasionally delivering Meals on Wheels. Conference biographies mention family outings with Abigail and their two young children, plus involvement in their church community. The engineer's world is not merely systems. Systems decide how people experience vulnerable moments.
That perspective keeps the company's aspiration unusually concrete. A “secure closing” can sound like industry copy until one imagines the buyer at a kitchen table, rereading an account number before sending years of savings into the financial system. The product has to protect that person without adding another maze. White's recurring pairing of safety with simplicity is therefore more than aesthetic preference. Friction can protect, but too much friction sends hurried users back to improvised channels. The design challenge is to put the guardrail exactly where the risk appears.
There is a gentle irony in White's career. A performance architect trained to make computation faster now runs a company whose finest outcome is emotional quiet. A buyer confirms an identity. Money reaches the proper account. The title office keeps a record. Everyone gets on with the move.
The old process demanded faith in the inbox. White's project is to replace that faith with a sequence of verified handoffs, then make the sequence easy enough that people use it. Security, when it is working, does not feel heroic. It feels like nothing happened. For a family carrying boxes into a new home, nothing is a lovely result.