homeownership
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Jeffrey Walker
Jeffrey Walker is the co-founder and CEO of CredEvolv, a fintech SaaS platform that turns declined loan applicants into mortgage-ready borrowers by connecting lenders, consumers, and HUD-certified nonprofit credit counselors in a single ecosystem. A four-decade mortgage-industry veteran who held senior roles at Fannie Mae, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, CitiMortgage, and SunTrust, Walker left the corporate ladder to attack a problem that kept him up at night: hundreds of thousands of creditworthy Americans denied home loans every year. Under his leadership CredEvolv has served 36,000+ consumers, earned him a HousingWire Vanguard Award, and landed him on Inman's Best of Finance list four years running.
George Fatheree
George Fatheree is the founder and CEO of Oro, a Los Angeles public benefit corporation that brings housing support into the workplace as an employee benefit. A former Big Law real estate partner at Sidley Austin, Munger Tolles & Olson and Skadden, he is best known for engineering the historic return of Bruce's Beach to the Bruce family in 2022, the first time in U.S. history that land seized through racially motivated eminent domain was returned to a Black family. He now applies the same financial and legal machinery to closing the wealth gap at scale, raising $3 million in early 2026 to launch Oro's housing wellness platform.
Jonathan Chao
Jonathan Chao is the co-founder of Haven, a mortgage servicing technology platform built to engage the 53 million U.S. homeowners with a mortgage. A UC Berkeley applied-math grad who started his career as an actuary, he became one of the earliest employees at Credit Karma, led consumer product at Plaid, then launched Haven in 2020. He served as CEO through the company's $8M Series A before stepping into the Chief Product Officer seat in 2023 to focus on the product he set out to build. He was named a 2024 HousingWire Rising Star.
Niles Lichtenstein
Niles Lichtenstein is the CEO and Co-Founder of Nestment, a San Francisco-based platform helping first-time homebuyers purchase property through co-buying and expert coaching. Shaped by watching his immigrant mother rent rooms in their Berkeley home to stay afloat after his father's death, Lichtenstein spent a decade quietly co-buying properties with friends and family before formalizing the model into Nestment in 2021. The company has since raised $3.5M in pre-seed funding and facilitated over $200M in real estate transactions, with 74% of buyers being first-timers and 62% identifying as BIPOC or immigrants. Before Nestment, he founded The History Project (later Enwoven), a digital storytelling platform backed by The New York Times Company that powered Ambassador Richard Holbrooke's history into an HBO documentary.