Company Dossier · Mortgage Technology · New York
Tidalwave
The agentic-AI company trying to make the American mortgage feel like it belongs in this decade - a fully verified home-loan application in about 35 minutes, in more than 30 languages.
The agentic-AI company trying to make the American mortgage feel like it belongs in this decade - a fully verified home-loan application in about 35 minutes, in more than 30 languages.
Buying a home in the United States still involves a strange amount of waiting - for a human to review a bank statement, re-request a pay stub, or key the same numbers into another system. Tidalwave, a New York startup founded in 2023, was built on the premise that most of that work does not need a human at all.
Its product is SOLO, an agentic-AI mortgage point-of-sale platform. Rather than bolting a chatbot onto legacy origination software, Tidalwave built AI into the loan file itself. SOLO answers borrower questions around the clock, transcribes a phone call into a started application in real time, reviews documents for errors, analyzes a bank statement in about five or six minutes, and connects directly to income, employment and asset verification services. The company says the result is a borrower application that is finished - and fully verified - in roughly 35 minutes.
The pitch to lenders is blunt: automate the repetitive 70% of the work, keep loan officers focused on the 30% that needs judgment. Tidalwave reports a 90%-plus application-to-submission conversion rate and, through real-time verification integrations, says it has cut loan processing times by as much as 67%.
"The mortgage industry has long been reliant on disjointed tools and manual intervention, leading to costly delays."
Tidalwave sells to lenders - banks, credit unions and independent mortgage banks. Named adopters include DHI Mortgage (the mortgage arm of homebuilder D.R. Horton), NEXA Lending, First Colony Mortgage, Mortgage Solutions Financial, Flat Branch, Contour, mPower, Developers Mortgage and GNB.
Slow, manual origination; inconsistent underwriting; document back-and-forth; and a language gap. Tidalwave cites that 23% of Hispanic Americans call language a barrier to a mortgage and 51% pay out of pocket for translation - so SOLO answers in 30+ languages, launching with Spanish to reach a $1.7T market.
Plenty of mortgage vendors have added "AI." Tidalwave's argument for standing apart rests on three claims. First, it is AI-native: the intelligence sits inside the loan file, not on top of a decades-old system. Second, it emphasizes hallucination-free AI - answers are grounded in the actual loan data rather than the open internet, with real-time audit trails, which matters in a heavily regulated business. Third, it is multilingual by design, not by translation layer.
Its competitive field includes legacy and modern POS and origination platforms - ICE's Encompass, Blend, SimpleNexus, Maxwell, Roostify - and large lenders such as Better and Rocket that build automation in-house. Tidalwave's founders know that terrain: CEO Diane Yu was CTO at Better, and her co-founders held engineering roles there and at FreeWheel, the ad-tech company Yu built and sold to Comcast for $375M in 2014.
Built from the loan file up, not a bot layered on legacy software.
Grounded in real loan data with real-time audit trails for compliance.
30+ languages across the whole process, starting with Spanish.
Wired into Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Plaid, Argyle and Truv.
A set of agents that together carry a loan from a first conversation to a verified, submittable file.
Mortgage-only AI giving 24/7, regulation-compliant answers and building persistent loan memory.
Auto-detects errors and discrepancies; forensic bank-statement analysis in ~5-6 minutes.
Voice-to-application: turns a phone call into a started file, auto-populating fields live.
Real-time income/asset checks and dual AUS with instant pre-qualification at the point of application.
Real-time borrower support across 30+ languages, launched with Spanish.
Sold to banks, credit unions and IMBs as a replacement for legacy digital mortgage POS.
Tidalwave is a B2B SaaS business. It sells SOLO to mortgage lenders as an "agentic AI mortgage POS+," positioning it against the legacy digital point-of-sale software those lenders already run. The value story is cost: Freddie Mac research it cites suggests roughly $1,500 in potential savings per loan, and Tidalwave frames its automation as a way to lower cost per loan while improving consistency.
The market it is aiming at is enormous. The Mortgage Bankers Association projects about $1.46 trillion in US mortgage originations for 2026. Tidalwave says it is on track to power more than 200,000 loans a year - roughly 4% of that market. Whether it reaches that figure is unproven, but the ambition, and the backing, are real: its $22M Series A closed in November 2025 with homebuilder D.R. Horton both investing and using the product.
"Tidalwave stood out for its powerful application of real AI to solve a massive, industry-wide problem."
Diane Yu, Jack Deng and Cheng Li launch an AI-native mortgage startup.
Backed by Engineering Capital to build the SOLO platform.
Conversational applications, automated document review, and direct Fannie/Freddie and verification-partner integrations go live.
SOLO expands to 30+ languages and integrates with ICE's Encompass; NEXA, First Colony and others adopt it.
Permanent Capital leads; D.R. Horton participates; company projects ~4% of the US mortgage market.
It builds SOLO, an agentic AI mortgage point-of-sale platform that automates the home-loan process - document review, data extraction, borrower communication, verification and underwriting support - for lenders and their borrowers.
Founded in 2023 in New York by Diane Yu (CEO), Jack Deng (CTO) and Cheng Li (Tech Ops & CISO), a team with roots at FreeWheel, Better and Google.
About $24M total - a $2M seed in 2023 and a $22M Series A in November 2025 led by Permanent Capital, with participation from D.R. Horton and Engineering Capital.
It is AI-native rather than a bot on legacy software, emphasizes hallucination-free AI grounded in real loan data, supports 30+ languages, and integrates directly with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and verification partners for a ~35-minute verified application.
Mortgage lenders - banks, credit unions and IMBs - including DHI Mortgage (D.R. Horton), NEXA Lending, First Colony Mortgage and Mortgage Solutions Financial, plus their borrowers.