Bringing Mortgage Tech into the Modern Age: Our Investment in Polly
Mortgages are the single largest source of debt held by Americans. The U.S. mortgage industry is one of the largest in the world, with roughly $11 trillion of residential mortgage debt outstanding and $2.6 trillion of new originations forecasted this year. Interest rates, while rising in recent weeks, remain historically low and have allowed mortgage originations and refinancings to continue to flourish.
Despite the robust growth of the industry, many of the technology solutions that have dominated and powered the mortgage market haven’t changed in decades. These software systems were built to be inherently closed and proprietary by nature, keeping information siloed and inhibiting workflows for end-users. Over the years, as the market consolidated, intended product synergies fell short or were abandoned, leaving customers to navigate complex, sometimes manual processes. These clunky, unintuitive workflows cost mortgage professionals valuable time and have left the industry in a productivity sinkhole.
A sluggish and poorly served market creates opportunity for disruption. Today, we’re thrilled to announce our Series B lead investment in Polly, a SaaS platform aiming to upend incumbents with modern capital markets infrastructure for the mortgage industry.
Polly allows mortgage banks to price and trade loans effortlessly through its cloud-native system of record and automation engine. The platform seamlessly connects buyers and sellers of mortgage loans through API integrations, ultimately reducing loan processing times and increasing gain on sale execution. Its technology automates workflows and provides actionable data analytics for its customers, helping lenders and loan buyers optimize performance from rate lock to loan sale and delivery. And the best is yet to come. With several new products on the horizon, Polly’s innovation machine will continue to redefine the mortgage capital markets.
Polly’s customers love the product and are already reaping the benefits of more efficient, integrated processes and immense time savings. Gone are the days of exporting data from one system into a spreadsheet just to upload it into another. What once took upwards of 30 minutes to set up and price in a legacy system now takes 2-3 minutes in Polly. Just two years since inception, Polly has seen impressive customer traction and shows no sign of slowing down.
Mortgage capital markets are extremely complex, and perhaps no one is better suited to solve the issues plaguing the industry than Polly’s founder and CEO, Adam Carmel. Prior to Polly, Adam founded Ethos, another startup in the mortgage space (sold to One American Mortgage) and ran operations at Provident, a large lender. Adam has incredible domain expertise, grit and integrity. He deeply understands the shortcomings of the products in this space and has a compelling vision for how modern cloud software can improve the industry.
Polly joins a growing portfolio of exciting Menlo proptech companies (including Qualia, HomeLight, and Hover) and further bolsters our commitment to backing world-class vertical SaaS and data companies (Benchling, Everlaw, Carta, Enable, Affinity, H1—to name a few). If you are a founder hell-bent on disrupting a legacy software incumbent in a large vertical, we’d love to hear from you!
