He watched a $4 million loan take six months to close - through email, phone tag and processes unchanged since 1990. Then he built the software to kill the fax machine of commercial real estate.
Ask most people about the paperwork behind a commercial building loan and their eyes glaze. Yaakov Zar's did the opposite. He watched a $4 million deal grind through six months of back-and-forth and saw a spreadsheet where everyone else saw a phone book.
Today Zar runs Lev, a New York company he founded in September 2019 to modernize how commercial real estate gets financed. It started as a tech-enabled brokerage: human advisors, plus a data engine that could match a borrower against nearly 10,000 lenders. It has since become something more ambitious - an AI-powered CRM and agentic workflow platform for brokers, lenders and sponsors, built to ingest messy, unstructured deal data and move it faster than any inbox ever could.
The premise is almost rude in its simplicity. Commercial real estate finance is a market worth hundreds of billions a year, and much of it still runs on the same process it used in 1990 - maybe with email swapped in for the fax. Finding the right lender is hard. Getting through the loan and term-sheet process is harder. Zar looked at that friction and decided it wasn't a fact of life. It was a bug.
The fact that you have names of people at banks doesn't mean that you deserve one or two basis points of that transaction.
Zar's first company had nothing to do with real estate. In 2013 he co-founded Dispatch, a workforce-management platform for enterprise home-service businesses - the software behind the plumbers, HVAC techs and repair crews who show up at your door. As Chief of Strategy he led product and sales to large national accounts. In 2018, Vista Equity Partners acquired the company. He had built something, sold it, and could have coasted.
Instead he went looking for a harder problem. The spark, fittingly, went back to a real estate app he'd built as a student at Boston University, where he studied entrepreneurship and graduated in 2012. Real estate had given him his first taste of tech. Now he'd return to its least glamorous corner and try to rewire it.
Lev's early product, "Brain by Lev," connected borrowers with that vast lender network by fusing public data, a lender-relations team's intelligence, and feedback from real term sheets. The pitch to the industry was pointed: brokers had built businesses on exclusivity - on knowing a name at a bank. Zar rejected the model. He wanted to level the playing field, offering full-service brokerage for those who wanted it and self-serve access for those who didn't.
Investors bought in fast. A $10 million seed round in early 2021 drew JLL Spark and the founders of LoopNet and Trulia. By mid-2021 Lev had raised $30 million at a valuation near $130 million. Then, in May 2022, it announced $170 million in new funding - a $70 million Series B led by Parker89 and Cross River Digital Ventures, stacked with names like NFX, Canaan, Capital One Ventures and Citi Ventures, plus $100 million in debt financing. All told, more than $200 million behind a bet on boring.
There's a large segment of deals that we want to do, and a lot of deals that we don't do and will never do - and that's part of our drive towards leveling the playing field.
Here is the twist that defines Lev's second act. Brokers - the very people a tech-enabled brokerage might be expected to disrupt - kept asking Zar for his internal tools. They didn't want a competitor. They wanted the software. So in early 2024 Lev extended its platform to brokers and built what it calls the CRE industry's first data-driven, AI-powered CRM: a system that lets sponsors and brokers connect with new lenders, manage existing relationships, and automate the financing process, cutting the manual data entry that had defined the job.
The best pivots aren't escapes. They're customers telling you what they actually want. Lev today pitches itself as AI agents, market intelligence, and workflow automation in one place - the connective tissue that lets a firm move faster and close more deals. By 2026, Zar was a regular on the conference and podcast circuit, talking about "defensible AI" and agentic workflows in an industry that, not long ago, still ran on faxes.
Zar describes himself, without flinching, as "naturally a very anxious person" - a trait his sister Kimberly Zar Bloorian, founder of the brand KLOUD, can vouch for. It's an unusual thing for a founder to say out loud. But it fits. Anxiety, well-aimed, is a product spec. A person who cannot stand uncertainty is exactly the person you want obsessing over the most nerve-wracking transaction in real estate, hunting for every place a deal can stall.
He lives on Manhattan's Lower East Side with his wife Dassi and their daughter, and the couple have volunteered at Chabad House Bowery. On Lev's own team page, his portrait isn't a corporate headshot - it's an 8-bit pixel-art avatar in a green Lev cap, half-grinning. He once posted a picture of "a turkey using Lev" on LinkedIn. For a man wrestling a trillion-dollar industry into the present tense, he keeps a light touch.
The through-line across Dispatch and Lev is the same argument, made twice: the unglamorous back office of a huge industry deserves great software, and the person who builds it doesn't have to be the loudest one in the room - just the most stubborn about the details. Zar has been having that argument with the same problem for over a decade. He doesn't seem close to done.
His first taste of tech was a real estate app he built in college - the same industry he'd later try to rewire.
Dispatch, his first company, served plumbers and HVAC techs - not a building loan in sight.
Lev's team page renders him as an 8-bit avatar in a green cap. On brand for a builder.
His sister, Kimberly Zar Bloorian, founded the brand KLOUD.
He once posted "a picture of a turkey using Lev." The man has range.
Lower East Side resident; he and his wife Dassi have volunteered at Chabad House Bowery.
Zar sits down to unpack how a former tech entrepreneur is changing the way commercial real estate deals get done - the story behind Lev's pivot from brokerage to software, and what's next for AI in real estate.
▶ What It Takes to Modernize Commercial Real Estate Finance (YouTube)
Commercial real estate finance is way more broken than residential - the same processes since 1990, maybe with email instead of faxes.
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.
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