Yaakov Zar

Yaakov Zar is the founder and CEO of Lev, a New York company rebuilding how commercial real estate gets financed. He started Lev in 2019 after watching a $4 million loan crawl through six months of email, faxes and paperwork - and decided a $200-billion-a-year industry running on 1990s process deserved better software. Lev began as a tech-enabled brokerage connecting borrowers to nearly 10,000 lenders, raised more than $200 million, then pivoted into an AI-powered CRM and agentic workflow platform for brokers, lenders and sponsors. Before Lev, Zar co-founded Dispatch, a workforce platform sold to Vista Equity Partners in 2018.