Credit: Canva Vesta has raised a $30M Series B to expand AI agents that handle mortgage origination work, including underwriting decisions, with three customer lenders among the investors. The same software sold in Europe would be high-risk under the AI Act, and GDPR already limits automated decisions of this kind. Vesta has raised a $30M Series B to put AI agents inside mortgage lenders. Conversion Capital led the round, and three lenders already using the software invested alongside Citi Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Chief executive Mike Yu said demand had “exploded in the last year” and revenue is up twelvefold, he told TechCrunch. Vesta has raised $85M in total and puts its market share below 5%. Lenders on its platform originate more than $100B of mortgages a year, HousingWire reported. About 40% of tasks running through Vesta are now handled by agents and automated workflows.
Those tasks reach further than paperwork. Lenders use the agents for document review and data validation, and some for underwriting decisions, condition clearing and closing package review. The appeal is cost. A US mortgage takes around 40 days to close and roughly $11,000 to produce, mostly labour.
The Mortgage Bankers Association has put origination costs above $10,000 for years. Yu credits one model. He named Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 as the breakthrough, saying it followed configured instructions over the long stretches that mortgage work demands. Automated lending decisions carry a record.
The Markup found in 2021 that US lenders were 80% more likely to deny Black applicants than comparable white ones, after controlling for 17 financial factors. Yu says responsibility does not move. Lenders remain accountable for underwriting whatever software they use, he said, and every action and the reasoning behind it is logged for audit. Europe does not leave that to the vendor.
The AI Act puts systems that evaluate the creditworthiness of natural persons in its high-risk class, and mortgage approval sits squarely inside it. That brings obligations rather than guidance. Providers face conformity assessment and registration, while deployers must assign human oversight to competent staff, keep six months of logs and run a fundamental rights impact assessment. Those duties were pushed back.
Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 deferred them from August this year to 2 December 2027, enforced by an AI Office that can fine 3% of turnover. One rule is not waiting. GDPR Article 22 already restricts decisions made solely by automated means where they carry legal or similarly significant effects, and a refused mortgage is the textbook case. Europe already has a version of this.
Taktile in Berlin raised $110M in June for agents that underwrite business loans, which point 5(b) does not reach because it covers natural persons.
