A four-year-old marketplace home lender that was created to transform the manual mortgage process is closing down. Among the factors cited for the demise was regulation.
Sindeo Inc., a San Francisco-based private company, was originally co-founded by Ori Zohar and Sindeo Chief Executive Officer Nick Stamos in 2013 as MoneyPark Inc.
A January 2015 announcement called the company a “modern mortgage marketplace” and promised to make the home lending process more timely, competitive and transparent.
At the time, Stamos said mortgages were the only part of the real estate process that were still manual and not yet transformed by technology.
Between
July 2014 and November2015, Sindeo filed notices of exempt offering of securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission that totaled $19.5 million. In addition, it announced that it raised $6.5 million in funding in February 2015.
Executives were recruited from
the likes of Trulia, SoFi, Prosper Marketplace and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
More than 40 employees were on the payroll as of
February 2015, while over a thousand loan programs were made available in its marketplace.
But Sindeo will no longer try to transform the real estate finance process.
A message on its website from
Stamos said a decision was made to wind down the company.
He explained that while it is difficult to operate a startup company, it’s even more difficult to simplify the complex and highly regulated
mortgage business.
Despite to demise of Sindeo, “We helped our clients save millions of dollars on their home loans,” Stamos said in the message.
A majority of jobs have been eliminated, and a small team will remain for a short period to manage the remaining pipeline.
“I am devastated for our employees, their families, our partners and our investors who believed in us, and worked so hard to build Sindeo,” the notice stated.
Sindeo is the third non-bank mortgage-related casualty so far during 2017 covered by Mortgage Daily. Overall business closings and failures, including financial institutions, total 13 so far this year.
