Figure Technologies, the fast-growing blockchain lending startup, has a new president.
Figure, which recently raised $103 million in its Series C round of funding, announced Wednesday that it name former president and chief operating officer of Coinbase Asiff Hirji as the company’s new president.
Hirji left Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, last year.
Before he was at Coinbase, Hirji was an operating partner with notable venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.
Hirji also previously served as president and COO of TD Ameritrade, growing that business into the nation’s largest online broker.
Hirji has also held senior leadership roles with TPG Capital, Saxo Bank, HP, and Bain Capital and has served on a number of public and private boards including Citrix and Advent Software, according to a release.
And now, Hirji joining Figure, the recently minted billion-dollar company, to help it grow.
Just last month, thanks to a new round of funding, Figure became worth more than $1 billion and reached unicorn status, a term for privately held startups that are valued at more than $1 billion, in less than two years.
The company entered the home equity lending market first, rolling out its signature product, Figure Home Equity, which is a hybrid between a traditional home equity loan and a HELOC that allows homeowners to borrow from their home equity.
Then the company expanded into a different form of equity, unveiling a program that it called an alternative to reverse mortgages. The program, called Figure Home Advantage, sees the company buy a property outright from a homeowner, who then rents the house back from Figure for as long as they want to.
The company’s lending platform is operated on Provenance.io, a blockchain platform developed by Figure last year that is used to originate, finance and sell HELOCs to banks, asset managers and credit funds.
Founded in 2018, Figure now claims it is the fourth-largest originator of HELOC loans in the United States.
“Asiff has already been a critical advisor to me on how we manage the growth of Figure in order to drive the transformation of financial services across categories and around the world,” said Cagney, CEO and co-founder of Figure. “His deep experience in the financial services industry and his long history of helping companies drive and manage growth are both going to be important to the growth of Figure and the creation of our new merchant bank.”
At Figure, Hirji will help Mike Cagney run the company and expand into new markets. Specifically, Hirji will be “building a new merchant bank division of the company that will serve institutional customers and facilitate the institutional financial services transactions” on the company’s blockchain platform.
“Blockchain will crash the costs of financial services, making products more affordable and available to all. Figure is one of the very few companies actually turning that promise into reality,” Hirji said. “The opportunity now is to scale to more financial products and open this capability to all financial institutions. I feel fortunate to be able to help make the promise of blockchain a reality.”
