Real estate tech startup Spruce announced on Wednesday a Series C funding round of $60 million led by Zigg Capital and backed solely by repeat investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners. With the addition of its latest round, Spruce’s total funding is now at $110 million.
Founded in 2016, Spruce is known most notably for its a platform intended to assist mortgage lenders, real estate investors and PropTech companies manage title and closing processes. The New York-based startup’s latest funding round will focus on continued expansion of its technology as it navigates the highly competitive and ever-growing digital mortgage space.
Previously, Zigg participated in Spruce’s $29 million Series B funding round in May, 2020 and is no stranger to the digital real estate space, having invested in digital mortgage closing platform Snapdocs‘ Series D round in May. Zigg also backed the $40 million seed round for Tomo Networks, a Connecticut-based digital mortgage startup founded by ex-Zillow executives Carey Armstrong and Greg Schwartz in October, 2020.
“Our work with our clients fundamentally changes the way partners and consumers experience real estate transactions,” said Patrick Burns, CEO and co-founder of Spruce. “While we’re just getting started, we’re more excited than ever to work with our innovative partners to build the one-click checkout for real estate, especially as the attention on consumer needs and expectations has surged.”
In March Spruce announced a joint project with insurtech platform Digital Partners and American Digital Title Insurance Company to offer a fully underwritten title commitment that it says can be completed in minutes. The joint project illustrated the tight partnership of Spruce with Munich Re, which owns both Digital Partners and American Digital Title Insurance Company and is an investor in the startup as well.
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Spruce currently works with clients including Better.com, Hometap, and US Wide. Executives said it is the only title solution to offer its open API directly on its website.
The tech startup said the new automated underwriting offering is part of its larger vision is to enable one-click real estate transactions ― a common theme among housing fintech companies as funding rounds and acquisitions dominated 2020’s continued shift to the “end-to-end” mortgage experience. It claims it reduced the time-to-close on mortgages – the industry standard of which is about 51 days – by 25%.
