Vesta raises $30M to bring AI agent swarms to mortgage lenders

Vesta, a software startup that uses artificial intelligence to help lenders originate mortgages, has raised $30 million in a round led by Conversion Capital, the company announced on Thursday. Three of Vesta’s customers, including Pennymac and New American Funding, also invested, alongside Citi Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Co-founded in 2020 by CEO Mike Yu and Devon Yang, Vesta uses AI agents to automate parts of loan origination. Yu told TechCrunch that revenue is up 12x year over year and that the company has helped lenders originate more than $100 billion in loans annually. Vesta has raised $85 million to date. Yu said the company has under 5% market share and plans to hire and invest in new products, including a personal assistant for mortgage issuers.

Yu said closing a U.S. mortgage takes around 40 days and costs around $11,000 per loan, with much of the cost coming from human labor. Vesta lets customers assign tasks to groups of AI agents, with some starting with a person approving the agents’ work before expanding their use. Yu said some lenders use Vesta agents for underwriting decisions, while companies remain responsible for those decisions. He said actions and reasoning are recorded for compliance and auditing.

Yu credited improvements in AI models for enabling more autonomous agents and said Claude Sonnet 4.5 better follows user-configured instructions over the time periods Vesta needs. The company competes with established mortgage software provider ICE Mortgage Technology and AI-focused Xpanse. Yu said its priority is winning more mortgage-industry customers.