States Title, which has quickly grown into one of the nation’s largest title insurance and settlement services companies, announced Thursday that it has raised $123 million to continue digitizing real estate closings.
According to the company, its Series C capital raise was led by Greenspring Associates, a comprehensive venture capital investment platform with over $10 billion in assets under management.
Also participating in the round with “significant” investments were new investors Horizons Ventures, Eminence Capital and HSCM Bermuda.
Each of States Title’s previous investors also participated in this latest round of funding, including a “large” investment from Foundation Capital, along with additional investments from SCOR Global P&C Ventures, and notable investors like Assurant, FifthWall Ventures and Lennar Ventures.
Fifth Wall is a venture capital firm backed by real estate titans like CBRE, Lennar, D.R. Horton, PulteGroup, Hines, Equity Residential, Prologis, Macerich, Host Hotels and Lowe’s Home Improvement, while Lennar Ventures is the venture capital arm of homebuilder Lennar.
States Title is on a serious growth trajectory, having acquired both North American Title Company and North American Title Insurance Company in 2019.
According to the company, those two acquisitions helped States Title grow transaction volume by 100x from 2018 to 2019. The company added that its combined business has closed or issued insurance policies for nearly half a million real estate transactions in the past year.
The company focuses on technology in its services, using data science to “create predictive title insurance based on an assigned risk score to indicate how safe a property is from liens or liabilities, helping to achieve faster title processing and more efficient underwriting.”
And the company sees this new funding as a way to continue reshaping the title insurance industry.
“The most pressing need in our industry right now is to remove friction and cost from mortgage closings, and to do so with solutions that can deliver fully remote, instant, digital experiences,” said Max Simkoff, founder and CEO of States Title.
“We are committed to further investment in our patented, industry-leading machine intelligence platform to support the goal of providing an instant closing experience at a lower cost,” Simkoff said.
According to Jim Lim, managing general partner of Greenspring Associates, States Title’s process “streamlines the laborious title and escrow process,” adding that the company invested in States to push its growth forward.
“We are thrilled to support States Title as they advance the vision of an instant mortgage that closes with one tap,” Lim said. “Especially in the current economic climate, the mortgage industry needs to be re-imagined with transformative technological solutions to reduce costs and improve the customer experience. States Title is leading the vanguard of this transformation.”
