San Francisco-based Snapdocs, a digital closing platform for the mortgage industry, has announced a $150 million Series D funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $260 million and total valuation to more than $1.5 billion.
The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Sequoia, Y Combinator, F-Prime, Maverick, Alkeon and Wellington Management.
Snapdocs enables lenders to connect all parties and technologies involved in a mortgage transaction to complete the closing process online, bringing together lenders, settlement agents, title companies, borrowers and notaries.
In the seven months since it raised a $60 million Series C funding round, Snapdocs has increased its investments in innovation. The company touches nearly 20% of all U.S. real estate transactions representing over $60 billion in mortgage value.
“Closings require tight coordination between many parties in a fragmented ecosystem, all of whom have their own systems and processes,” said Aaron King, Snapdocs CEO. “Snapdocs is in the background doing the hard work of connecting the ecosystem to orchestrate the perfect close.”
In an interview with HousingWire, King said the many facets of digital closing are still befuddling tech companies.
“You can only get digital closing at scale when you connect this fragmented ecosystem,” he said. “It’s a concept that is newer, and most companies don’t understand it, and thus, they’re generating a lot of pain trying to execute digital closing without an understanding of what’s required.”
As King put it, the COVID-19 pandemic kicked the digital closing space “into high gear.”
“There was a period of time last year where we were growing incredibly fast,” he said. “The second quarter of last year was really Snapdoc’s peak acceleration, but even in the second half of last year we grew beyond the rate of how a healthy startup should grow.”
King echoed that once enough parties are digitizing their interactions and plugging in completely, there won’t be any going back.
“The actual infrastructure that’s being built are actually driving so much value, you can’t really go back to a paper process once you start using these tools,” he said. “This all comes down to really simple principles — when digital closing becomes more reliable, cheaper, and faster than paper closing, digital closing will take off.”