Figure Technology Solutions announced Wednesday a definitive agreement to acquire real estate investor-lender Kiavi, which includes a joint venture with global investment firm Sixth Street.
The transaction, which represents a $200 billion annual addressable origination opportunity, was made for $717 million, according to a Figure press release.
As structured, Figure will acquire Kiavi’s technology and operating platform, while Sixth Street will purchase Kiavi’s loan portfolio. That leaves Figure — a blockchain-native securitization and lending platform that has always been more in the technology business than the lending business — unburdened, leverage-wise.
About 20% of Figure’s current production comprise first-lien home equity loans. However, Figure projects that first-lien share will grow to around 40% by the end of 2027 with the addition of Kiavi’s origination volume.
With total production volume of $7.6 billion in 2025, Kiavi took the No. 1 spot in Scotsman Guide’s 2026 rankings of Top Private Lenders.
During a pair of interviews with Scotsman Guide after the deal was announced, the chief executives of Figure and Kiavi described the synergies touted in Wednesday’s press release as a marriage of datasets and technology-forward strategies to capture market share.
But behind the capital markets word scramble of “AI-powered decisioning” and “asset tokenization” within a “blockchain marketplace,” the two leaders also discussed fundamental shifts in U.S. mortgage markets they have been driving for the past decade.
“We’ve continued to grow during a tough real estate environment over the past four years,” said Arvind Mohan, CEO of Kiavi, which lends to real estate investors who buy and renovate properties to resell or rent using residential transition loans (RTLs) and debt-service coverage ratio (DSCR) loans.
As ballooning home prices and elevated mortgage rates have caused the first-lien purchase market to contract for multiple years, lending to real estate investors has grown, propping up home sales and accounting for about 3 in 10 home sales in 2025, according to real estate analytics firm Cotality. Capital markets are hungry for the production.
Noting that 80% of its production volume has been directly to investors or “retail” driven, Mohan said Figure’s network of 380 origination partners will support Kiavi’s push to wholesale its investor offerings, “supercharging” the product. As U.S. housing stock ages and a housing supply shortage deepens, demand for RTL loans is projected to grow.
“We look forward to leveraging their distribution, with our technology,” said Mohan. “And ultimately it’s going to be really good for customers as we open up to broker partners.”
In a data-heavy, vendor-heavy industry like mortgage lending, frictions add cost at every juncture of the origination, funding and loan sale process. Figure set out in 2018 to smooth out those frictions, using a nascent home equity lending market to demonstrate how the blockchain — an immutable digital ledger — can streamline secondary execution.
Figure was not responding to shifts in mortgage markets, specifically, but instead to massive reallocations of assets out of the traditional banking system and into private credit markets as decentralized financial technologies drive new forms of credit creation.
Now years into that process, the company has launched a combined lien and e-note registry service, as well as Figure Connect, a blockchain-based marketplace for buying and selling private credit loans. Every marginal partner added, the company believes, deepens and expands access to liquidity across the entire marketplace.
Buried in Wednesday’s press release, Figure said Kiavi’s assets would be the first onboarded to Figure Connect through Adaptor, a product leveraging agentic AI “to impose uniformity to disparate originator data schemes across all asset types” when bringing new partners into its blockchain-based marketplace.
“No one else has this,” said Michael Tannenbaum, CEO of Figure, of the “translation layer” that the company is now developing to augment adoption of its technology and consistency across non-agency secondary markets, where it can be difficult for investors to compare one originator or product to another, even within rated securitizations.
Furthermore, most non-agency originators and secondary investors have their own ways of reporting their data, interpreting guidelines and assessing collateral performance.
Melding the two most advanced technologies transforming home lending today — AI and blockchain — Tannenbaum said it was “important” to develop this translation layer agentically, “in the event that there’s a post-closing agent rather than a person driving these interactions.”
“Fannie and Freddie have a uniform language for underwriting,” said Tannenbaum, “but they don’t have a way to take assets and distribute it across an investor network using the same uniform language across diverse products and portfolios.”
