Vesta 是一家专注于为贷款机构提供抵押贷款发放服务的 AI 原生软件初创公司。该公司于周四宣布，已完成由 Conversion Capital 领投的 3000 万美元融资。
Vesta, an AI-native software startup that helps lenders originate mortgages, announced on Thursday that it raised a $30 million round led by Conversion Capital.
这家初创公司利用 AI 智能体自动化贷款发放流程中的大部分环节。据创始人称，这有助于贷款机构缩短抵押贷款处理时间并降低相关成本。公司的三家客户——包括 Pennymac 和 New American Funding——也加入了本轮融资，与 Citi Ventures 和 Andreessen Horowitz 一同投资。
The startup uses AI agents to automate much of the loan origination process, which, the founders say, helps lenders reduce the time and costs of processing mortgages. Three of the company’s customers, including Pennymac and New American Funding, also invested in the round alongside Citi Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Mike Yu 于 2020 年与 Devon Yang 共同创立了这家公司。作为公司首席执行官，Yu 在接受 TechCrunch 采访时表示，现在是进行融资的绝佳时机，因为产品需求“在过去一年中呈爆炸式增长”。他表示，公司收入同比增长了 12 倍，每年已帮助贷款机构发放超过 1000 亿美元的贷款。截至目前，公司累计已筹集 8500 万美元资金。
Mike Yu co-founded the company in 2020 with Devon Yang. Yu, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch that now was the perfect time to raise because demand for the product has “exploded in the last year.”He said revenue is up 12x year over year and that the company has helped originate more than $100 billion a year in loans for lenders. The company has raised $85 million in funding to date.
Yu 表示：“尽管我们的发展势头强劲，但市场份额仍不足 5%。现在正是扩大团队、抢占市场并投资新产品线的时机。”
“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.
这些新产品线包括一款面向抵押贷款发行机构的个人助手，能够协助执行任务并追踪工作流程。在美国，完成一笔抵押贷款通常需要约 40 天，每笔贷款的成本约为 11000 美元。“其中大部分成本来自人力，而时间流程中的主要瓶颈，往往只是等待人工审核贷款。”Yu 解释说，Vesta 的理念是让人类部署一个由 AI 智能体组成的“群体”，以加快任务完成速度。
Those new product lines include a personal assistant for mortgage issuers that can help perform tasks and track workflows. It takes around 40 days to close a mortgage in the U.S., costing around $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.”With Vesta, the idea is to allow humans to deploy a swarm of agents to speed completion of tasks.
客户可以自行决定将哪些任务分配给 Vesta 智能体：“许多客户最初会由人工审核 AI 智能体的工作成果，随后逐步让其独立处理部分贷款，再进一步扩展使用范围。”他还补充说，一些贷款机构甚至已经开始使用 Vesta 的 AI 智能体进行抵押贷款的审批决策。
Customers decide what tasks they want to assign the Vesta agents: “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, adding that some lenders are even using Vesta AI agents to make mortgage underwriting decisions.
他表示，无论公司使用何种软件或人工智能代理，它们仍需对承销决策负责。Yu补充说，所有决策背后的行动和推理过程都会被记录，以确保合规并用于审查人工智能的决策。
Companies remain responsible for underwriting decisions, he said, regardless of what software or AI agents they use, and Yu added that all actions and reasoning behind a decision are recorded for compliance and to audit AI decisions.
这种程度的自主性源于过去一年人工智能模型取得的巨大进步。在当时，这些模型尚不足以构建能够处理抵押贷款中复杂多阶段任务的人工智能代理。此前，该公司仅专注于构建合适的数据架构，以便利用最先进的工具实现抵押贷款流程的自动化。
This level of autonomy stems from the vast improvements in AI models in the past year, which weren’t good enough, at that time, to build agents for the complex multi-stage tasks involved in mortgage lending. Before, the company was just focused on building the right data architecture to use the most advanced tools to automate the mortgage process.
Yu表示：“对我们而言，重大的突破是 [Claude] Sonnet 4.5。我们发现，与之前的版本相比，它在我们需要的时间范围内，能够更有效地遵循用户设定的指令。”
“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.
在许多方面，Vesta 正在与 ICE Mortgage Technology 等传统抵押贷款系统，以及同样致力于实现抵押贷款流程自动化的其他原生人工智能公司（如 Xpanse）展开竞争。
Vesta is, in many ways, competing against both traditional mortgage systems like ICE Mortgage Technology and other AI-native companies also trying to automate the mortgage lending process like Xpanse.
Yu 表示，至少在与传统老牌企业的竞争中，Vesta 的优势在于这些公司并非为人工智能代理而构建，“在它们的基础上叠加人工智能代理非常困难”。至于未来方向，Yu 说：“我们的优先任务是赢得抵押贷款行业其余企业的业务。之后，我们将跟随客户的指引继续前进。”
At least against legacy incumbents, Yu said Vesta’s advantage is that those companies weren’t built for AI agents, and “putting AI agents on top of them is very hard,” he said. As for what’s next, “our priority is earning the business of the rest of the mortgage industry,” Yu said. “Then, we’ll go wherever our customers take us.”