Vesta Raises $30M to Deploy AI Agent Swarms on Mortgage Lenders

Vesta, an AI-native mortgage software startup, has raised a $30 million round led by Conversion Capital, with three of its own customers — including Pennymac and New American Funding — investing alongside Citi Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

The round brings Vesta's total funding to $85 million since Mike Yu and Devon Yang co-founded the company in 2020. Yu, the CEO, told TechCrunch the timing was deliberate: demand for the product has "exploded in the last year," and revenue is up 12x year over year.

The company still sees itself as early. "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 in a statement to TechCrunch.

What does Vesta actually automate?

The startup deploys AI agents to handle much of the loan origination process. The stakes are large: closing a mortgage in the U.S. takes around 40 days and costs roughly $11,000 per loan. "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.

Lenders control how much autonomy each agent gets. "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 explained. Some lenders now use Vesta's agents to make mortgage underwriting decisions.

Yu stressed that lenders remain legally responsible for underwriting outcomes regardless of the software they use. Every action and the reasoning behind each decision is recorded, he said, to support compliance audits of AI decisions.

Why now? The model breakthrough

The leap to autonomous agents stems from improvements in AI models over the past year. Earlier models could not handle the complex, multi-stage tasks involved in mortgage lending, so Vesta previously focused on building the data architecture needed to automate the process.

"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," Yu said.

The new funding will also back a fresh product line: a personal assistant for mortgage issuers that performs tasks and tracks workflows.

Who is Vesta up against?

Vesta competes on two fronts. It faces legacy mortgage technology providers such as ICE Mortgage Technology, and AI-native rivals like Xpanse that are also automating loan origination.

Against incumbents, Yu argued the advantage is architectural. Legacy systems weren't built for AI agents, and "putting AI agents on top of them is very hard," he said. Against fellow AI-native startups, the company is betting that its head start on data architecture and its customer-investor base — Pennymac and New American Funding putting capital into the round — will compound.

The near-term goal is expansion within mortgage lending itself. "Our priority is earning the business of the rest of the mortgage industry," Yu said. "Then, we'll go wherever our customers take us."