Vesta raises $30M to deploy AI agent swarms in mortgage lending

Vesta, an AI-native mortgage software startup, raised $30 million in a round led by Conversion Capital, the company said Thursday.

Pennymac, New American Funding, Citi Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz also invested. Three of Vesta's customers — including Pennymac and New American Funding — joined the round.

How big is Vesta's traction?

The company has helped lenders originate more than $100 billion in loans annually. Revenue climbed 12x year over year, according to CEO Mike Yu, who co-founded Vesta in 2020 with Devon Yang.

"While the traction is great, we are still under 5% market share and now is the time to staff up, take the market, and invest in new product lines," Yu said.

Vesta has raised $85 million in funding to date.

What does the software actually do?

The startup deploys AI agents to automate chunks of the loan origination process. Lenders pick which tasks to assign. Many start with a human approving the agent's work, then let it handle a share of loans solo. Some lenders now use Vesta agents to make underwriting decisions outright.

"Many of our customers start an AI agent with a person approving its work, then let it handle a share of loans on its own, then expand," Yu said.

Companies remain responsible for underwriting outcomes, he added. Vesta records every action and reasoning step for compliance and audit.

Why raise now?

A U.S. mortgage still takes about 40 days to close and costs roughly $11,000 per loan, the company said. "Most of that cost is human labor, and a major bottleneck in the timeline is just waiting for a person to get to reviewing your loan," Yu said.

Demand for the product "exploded in the last year," Yu told TechCrunch. He credited the jump to recent gains in foundation models. "For us, the big breakthrough was [Claude] Sonnet 4.5, which we just found to be much better at adhering to user-configured instructions over the time horizons we need than previous generations," he said.

Vesta's next products include a personal assistant for mortgage originators that tracks workflows and executes tasks on request.

Who is Vesta up against?

The startup competes with ICE Mortgage Technology, the legacy platform that dominates loan origination software, and with fellow AI-native peers such as Xpanse. Yu framed the edge against incumbents bluntly: those systems "weren't built for AI agents, and putting AI agents on top of them is very hard."

What comes next?

Yu's stated priority is the rest of the U.S. mortgage industry. "Our priority is earning the business of the rest of the mortgage industry," he said. "Then, we'll go wherever our customers take us."

The new capital will fund hiring and new product lines. With the largest incumbents still running software built before the agent era, Vesta's bet is that lenders will rebuild their workflows on infrastructure designed for AI from the ground up — and that the same playbook will travel into adjacent financial services wherever customers push it.