Vesta raises $30M to scale AI agents for mortgage lenders

Vesta, an AI-native software startup that helps lenders originate mortgages, said on Thursday it had raised a $30 million round led by Conversion Capital. Three of the company’s customers — including Pennymac and New American Funding — joined the round alongside Citi Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Mike Yu co-founded Vesta in 2020 with Devon Yang. Yu, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch the timing was right because demand for the product has “exploded in the last year,” with revenue up 12x year over year. The company has now raised $85 million in total funding.

Even so, Yu said, “we are still under 5% market share and now is the time to staff up, take the market, and invest in new product lines.” Those lines include a personal assistant for mortgage issuers that tracks workflows and performs tasks. Closing a mortgage in the U.S. takes around 40 days and costs around $11,000 per loan, Yu said, with much of that cost coming from human labor and the wait for a person to review a loan.

Vesta’s pitch is to let lenders deploy swarms of AI agents to speed up that process. Customers choose which tasks to hand off: many start an agent with a person approving its work, then let it take on a share of loans independently before expanding its role, Yu said. He added that some lenders already use Vesta’s agents to make mortgage underwriting decisions, though lenders remain responsible for those decisions regardless of what software or AI agents they use. Every action and the reasoning behind it is logged, Yu said, for compliance and to audit AI decisions.

That level of autonomy wasn’t possible a year ago, when AI models weren’t reliable enough for the multi-stage work mortgage lending demands, Yu said; before then, Vesta focused on building the data architecture needed to eventually run the most advanced tools. “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.

Vesta competes with legacy mortgage systems like ICE Mortgage Technology as well as other AI-native rivals such as Xpanse. Against incumbents, Yu said, Vesta’s edge is that their systems weren’t built for AI agents: “putting AI agents on top of them is very hard.” Asked what’s next, Yu said the priority is “earning the business of the rest of the mortgage industry. Then, we’ll go wherever our customers take us.”

Why it matters

The round shows investors still backing AI agents for regulated, high-stakes financial workflows, with Vesta betting that incumbents’ legacy systems can’t easily bolt on the agentic tools reshaping loan origination.