digital-mortgage
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Steve Thompson
Steve Thompson is President and CEO of PrimeLending, the Dallas-based national mortgage lender that operates as a subsidiary of PlainsCapital Bank under Hilltop Holdings. He oversees roughly 1,300 loan originators nationwide along with the company's National Operations, Capital Markets, Joint Ventures and Marketing organizations. A UCLA economics graduate with an MBA from UC Irvine's Merage School, Thompson climbed from a regional sales manager who joined PrimeLending in 2011 to president in 2017 and to president and CEO in 2020, and he was named a 2023 HousingWire Vanguard for his leadership of the mortgage company.
Karl Jacob
Karl Jacob is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of LoanSnap, an AI-driven mortgage startup that pitched itself as the fix for a $13 trillion industry. Over more than two decades he founded or led companies including Dimension X (sold to Microsoft), Keen/Ingenio (sold to AT&T), Cloudmark (sold to Proofpoint) and Coveroo (sold to Zazzle), became one of Facebook's earliest advisors in 2005, and angel-invested in dozens of startups. LoanSnap raised roughly $100 million from backers like True Ventures, Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Reid Hoffman and Joe Montana before unraveling amid lawsuits, regulatory fines and an eviction between 2022 and 2024.
Nora Apsel
Nora Apsel is the co-founder and CEO of Morty, the New York-based online mortgage marketplace she helped build from a Techstars idea in 2016 into a full-stack platform that has facilitated over $2 billion in home loans across 45+ states. She joined as Morty's founding engineer, rose to COO, and took the CEO seat in 2020. A former nonprofit worker who retooled as a software engineer at Meetup and Flurry, she is driven by using product and technology to democratize access to financial products and make one of life's most opaque transactions - getting a mortgage - transparent and buyer-first.
Thuan Nguyen
Thuan Nguyen is the founder and CEO of Loan Factory, the No. 2 mortgage brokerage in the United States. A Vietnamese refugee turned UC Berkeley grad, he became the No. 1 loan officer in America in 2021 and 2022, and the first broker to cross $2 billion in annual loan volume. He runs the company out of San Jose and built MOSO, an in-house digital mortgage platform that now powers a network of more than 2,000 loan officers.
Mike Yu
Mike Yu is the co-founder and CEO of Vesta, a San Francisco-based startup building an AI-driven, cloud-native loan origination system (LOS) for the mortgage industry. A Stanford-trained product strategist who cut his teeth at Blend - where he helped land the Wells Fargo partnership and became the company's first licensed insurance agent - Yu launched Vesta in November 2020 after recognizing that mortgage infrastructure hadn't fundamentally changed since the 1990s. He has raised $55 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, and Conversion Capital, and was named a 2024 HousingWire Vanguard and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.