Fintech Unicorn Valon Hit A $2.3 Billion Valuation To Bring AI To America’s $13 Trillion Mortgage Market

The biggest pile of consumer debt in America isn’t sitting on credit cards or student loan balances. It’s in our homes.

Americans owe $13 trillion on their mortgages, which makes up nearly 70% of all consumer debt. Every month, billions in interest and principal payments must be collected, tracked and divvied up among lenders, investors, insurers and the IRS. Yet the industry tasked with handling it all, called mortgage servicing, still runs largely on out-dated technology and tedious human labor.

The result: billions of wasted dollars, and human hours. In 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received more than 30,000 mortgage complaints, with more than half involving payments and servicing.

Andrew Wang, Jon Hsu and Linda Du think there’s a better way: Let AI do the busywork. Their startup, New York-based Valon Technologies, has built a system to automate much of what mortgage companies pay people to do manually. On Monday, Valon announced a $150 million Series D backed by firms including Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $2.3 billion post-money.

They’ve hooked investors who are betting there’s big money in making the mortgage system automatic, streamlined, and even—exciting.

“Think about the things we consider sexy now. Customer support is suddenly sexy. Why? Because we’ve made it AI and now everyone’s talking about it,” says a16z partner Angela Strange. “Mortgage is going to be the next sexy thing.”

Valon’s bet began seven years ago, before AI agents became the pitch du jour. Wang got the idea while working at Soros Fund Management, where he dealt with mortgages and servicers from the investor end of the business, shocked at how inefficient an industry so sophisticated was. He called his Harvard classmate Du with a proposition: She should start a modern mortgage servicer and he would fund it. Du countered that they should do it together, or not at all.

Along with Hsu, they raised a $3.2 million seed round, backed by Soros, and launched Valon in 2019. A $50 million Series A led by a16z followed.

But the trio didn’t start by solo selling software to mortgage companies. To prove their software worked, they first built Valon into a mortgage servicing firm handling homeowner loans, employing AI to more efficiently track payments, manage taxes and insurance and handle borrower questions all on one platform. By 2025, it was servicing nearly 600,000 loans, helping land Valon on Forbes’ Fintech 50 list five years in a row, and Wang and Hsu on the Under 30 list. Revenue climbed from $41 million in 2024 to $86 million in 2025, per Forbes estimates.

All the while, Valon was building and testing the technology it eventually wanted to sell to everyone else.

“Everyone in AI pitches outcomes. They talk about how more efficient their AI agents will make your operations,” says Wang, who’s CEO. “When we pitch Valon, there’s a clear example that they can look at, experience, spend time with, and that’s just beyond any other form of proof that you can really get.”

That proof matters in the heavily-regulated mortgage industry where companies operate under layers of federal and state regulation, and violations and errors carry costly penalties.

Still, there is a real appetite for better technology, and many mortgage companies are already experimenting with AI. Chatbots that might be able to field routine questions are of particular interest. Some firms—like Freedom Mortgage, which recently announced a partnership with Palantir—are building new tools in house. Others are turning to third-party software providers like Valon. Recently contracted customers include Newrez, which services 4 million homeowners, and ServiceMac, managing 1 million loans.

Over the past year, Valon has been transitioning itself from a mortgage servicer that built software into a software company that sells to mortgage servicers. In August, Valon sold its entire servicing portfolio—roughly 800,000 loans—to Carrington Mortgage and went all-in as a pure software play. Carrington, which manages $200 billion in balances, then also signed on as a new ValonOS customer.

Brian McGrath, chairman at Valon and adviser to new investor Ribbit Capital, recalls sitting with Wang at a restaurant years ago, sketching out this exact business model on a napkin. The destination was software; running a servicer was how Valon planned to prove that software worked. Now Valon has to show what worked inside its own operation can work across everyone else’s. With nearly 400 employees and fresh capital, the company is recruiting from the likes of Google and Stripe and aiming to eventually have one in six U.S. mortgages running on its software.

“If you decide to keep the technology just for yourself and be an operating company, you don’t actually change the industry,” Du says. “You can probably build a $10 billion business if you had just kept the operating company and built it to its peak, but our ambitions are a lot larger than that.”