Digital commercial real estate underwriting platform has analyzed over $12 billion in deals in the last 12 months
Funding to be used to drive product development, enhanced customer service and hiring of key personnel
Blooma, the leading AI-powered digital underwriting platform for commercial real estate (CRE), today announced the close of a $15 million Series A investment round. Canapi Ventures led the round with participation from existing investor Nyca Partners. The Series A funding will be used to drive continued execution of Blooma’s product roadmap and support the hiring of key personnel to enable Blooma to better serve its quickly-growing base of commercial bank, private bank and broker customers in the CRE segment.
Founded in 2018, Blooma brings together best-in-class technology and a seamless workflow to significantly improve loan origination and portfolio monitoring processes for operators in the CRE space. On the loan origination side, Blooma uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract information from relevant documents to automate the deal evaluation process and empower users to make informed investment decisions quickly. The origination solution produces fast and accurate sales and income valuations based on intelligent market comparables and expense information. The platform is highly flexible and can be adapted to meet any lender’s existing processes or systems.
Blooma also offers CRE portfolio management intelligence that automates ongoing loan monitoring, auditing, stress testing and borrower analyses. By pulling in hundreds of data points for each loan, portfolios are continuously screened according to a rating system configured and controlled by the customer. Blooma connects via API to real-time market data sources that provide early indicators of risk at the loan and portfolio level, resulting in lower loan servicing costs and enhanced visibility into the portfolio.
Shayne Skaff, CEO of Blooma, said, “When we founded Blooma, we brought together some of the most talented technologists and lenders in the industry to create a solution that doesn’t just automate the lending process, but makes it smarterand more enjoyable. Blooma is a tool initially built for CRE lenders by CRE lenders – that’s part of our secret sauce. Since our launch, we have expanded our customer base to include brokers and asset managers as well. Now, with Canapi, we’ve found a partner who can help us make a real impact in an industry in desperate need of our solution.”
Blooma has already demonstrated an impressive ability to generate value for customers. Lenders on the system have reduced loan origination time by up to 75%, enabled 50% more transactions and achieved 4x reductions in origination and servicing costs. To date, the platform has analyzed over $12 billion in deals in the last 12 months and serves multiple commercial banks, private banks and brokers, including C3 Bank, Bank of Southern California and CBRE. Blooma has a clear path to continued growth as it expands its feature set to focus on innovating away key pain points in the ~$14 trillion U.S. commercial lending space.
Walker Forehand, Partner at Canapi Ventures and recent addition to the Blooma board, said, “Blooma’s technology is purposely designed for the CRE segment. With core competencies in extracting valuation, rent roll and other key financial data, Blooma is a force multiplier for CRE lenders, many of whom are constrained not by deal flow but by their inability to efficiently evaluate new opportunities and monitor existing portfolios. During diligence, we found that many of our LPs have been feeling this pain acutely, and we were extremely encouraged by the consistent positive reactions our banks have had to Blooma’s platform. We couldn’t be more excited to join Shayne and the rest of the Blooma team as they embark on this exciting new chapter of growth.”
For more such updates and perspectives around Digital Innovation, IoT, Data Infrastructure, AI & Cybsercurity, go to AI-Techpark.com.
