home-equity
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Graham Fleming and the value of changing direction
He built a mortgage lender, became an early-morning caller, and took charge as Finance of America narrowed its focus. Graham Fleming’s next chapter rests on the equity older homeowners already own.
LendingTree sells the second opinion.
It taught Americans to make banks compete. Now insurance pays most of the bills - and the cost of finding a customer explains the company better than its name.
Owning and the price of half a point
A mortgage lender turned a simpler process into a $23 billion year. Its next chapter shows what technology can change about borrowing - and what interest rates still control.
loanDepot built for speed. Then rates changed.
A digital mortgage machine met a market that stopped refinancing. Now loanDepot is betting on home equity, repeat customers and a channel it once abandoned.
Lakeview and the mortgage behind your mortgage
Your mortgage can carry one company’s name while another handles the payments. Lakeview’s business starts inside that gap - and reaches into your next home loan.
Lower wants to own the space between looking and buying.
A home search is easy to start. A mortgage is harder to finish. Lower is buying the technology and the audience to bring those two moments closer together.
Mike Cagney keeps finding a shorter route for money
He helped turn a Stanford alumni lending experiment into SoFi. After a contentious exit, Mike Cagney built Figure around the machinery behind loans. His latest venture, Navra, brings the same question back to the screen: why is moving money still so complicated?
Truehold lets you sell the house. Keep the address.
A home can hold a fortune and still leave its owner short of cash. Truehold turns that fortune into sale proceeds - and the homeowner into a tenant.
EasyKnock let you sell your house. The hard part was staying.
EasyKnock offered cash without a moving van by turning homeowners into tenants. Its December 2024 closure exposed the question behind the convenience: how secure was the way back to ownership?
Button Finance wants you to keep your mortgage. And borrow again.
A cheap first mortgage can be worth keeping. Button Finance builds its business around the borrowing that comes next, using digital underwriting to turn home equity into cash.
Trovy puts your house in your wallet
A home can make you wealthy on paper and leave you borrowing at credit-card rates. Trovy connects those two worlds with a HELOC you can swipe - and a set of terms worth reading before you do.
Homeward lets you buy the next house before selling this one
Your wealth can be sitting in the living room while your next home slips away. Homeward turns that awkward interval into a financing business - with your agent still in the picture.
Flueid Found the $1,500 Title Problem Hiding at the End of a Mortgage - Then Moved It to the Start
The mortgage industry used to discover title trouble after time and money had already been spent. Flueid built a decision layer that asks the awkward questions up front - and turns the answers into a workflow.
The Eight-Week Loan That Became Matthew Covi's Five-Year Fintech Build
A clumsy calculator started the idea. An eight-week home-equity loan sharpened it. Matthew Covi spent five years turning those irritations into Chimney - and then into an acquisition by Array.
Mark Schacknies Keeps Building the Same Machine - Only Faster
Across property booms, platform pivots and two exits, the NFTYDoor co-founder has kept returning to one stubborn question: why does moving money through real estate still require so much friction? His answer is equal parts software, distribution and knowing exactly whom the product must serve.
Flyhomes Raised $150 Million to Own the Homebuying Journey. Then It Learned to Get Out of the Way.
The Seattle startup tried to own the entire homebuying experience. A frozen housing market forced a sharper idea: let local professionals keep the customer, and give them the financial machinery to make moving possible.
NFTYDoor Turned a 45-Day HELOC Into a Weekend Product - Here’s the Workflow Lenders Can Copy
The McLean fintech found its wedge in the boring handoffs that make home-equity lending crawl. After an acquisition and a return to independence, its most useful lesson is not “add AI” - it is to own the whole wait.
The Startup Betting Your Bank Knows Your House Better Than You Do
Chimney put a home-equity meter inside 180+ banking apps. The pitch to lenders is blunt: your customers are richer than they realize, and you are the last to tell them.
Angela Tribelli
Angela Tribelli built a career translating complicated products into useful reasons to care. Now the veteran of books, streaming and financial media is taking on a harder brief: making home equity legible as a retirement tool.
Upstart
Upstart wants to replace the blunt instrument of conventional credit scoring with a learning system that prices each borrower more precisely. Its next test is larger than approval rates: proving an AI marketplace can grow through a full credit cycle without becoming the bank it once said it did not need to be.
Finance of America
Finance of America is betting that the most overlooked retirement account is the house itself. After shedding much of its old lending sprawl, the company is building a focused machine for turning home equity into usable cash - without asking older owners to sell.
RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing LLC
RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing LLC is a non-bank mortgage servicer and subservicer founded in 2007 and headquartered in Fort Mill, South Carolina. It manages the day-to-day life of residential mortgages - collecting payments, running escrow, handling modifications and hardship relief - and offers third-party subservicing to investors and lenders. Authorized to service in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, RoundPoint became a wholly owned subsidiary of Two Harbors Investment Corp. (NYSE: TWO) in 2023.
Aven
Aven is a San Francisco-based fintech that built the first credit card backed by home equity. It pairs a Visa with a HELOC so homeowners can borrow against their house at mortgage-like rates while earning 2% unlimited cash back. Founded in 2019 by ex-Facebook and Square engineers, Aven hit a $2.2B valuation in 2025 after a $110M Series E led by Khosla Ventures and is building what it calls a 'machine banking' platform for American homeowners.
Sadi Khan
Sadi Khan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aven, a San Francisco-based fintech unicorn valued at $2.2 billion that created the world's first home equity-backed credit card. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate, Khan spent over a decade at Facebook leading product for Internet.org, Maps, Search, and Ads before co-founding Aven in 2019. Aven has since issued over $3 billion in credit lines, saved consumers more than $215 million in interest, and raised $252 million in total funding. Known for his maximally rational decision-making style and habit of wearing the same outfit every day to reduce cognitive load, Khan aims to build America's first 'machine banking' platform and democratize access to home equity for millions of homeowners.