San Francisco, Calif.‑based mortgage technology start‑up Polly, recently rebranded from PollyEx, announced on Thursday that it raised $15M in a Series A funding round led by seasoned venture capitalist firm 8VC. Other investors in this round include Menlo Ventures, Conversion Capital, Meritech Capital, Fifth Wall, and Base10 Partners.

Polly began as a mortgage loan trading exchange and launched a revolutionary Product and Pricing Engine (PPE) in September of 2020, a bold strategy in an extremely competitive market that includes data and analytics giant Black Knight and its Optimal Blue PPE. According to the company, it is now processing tens of thousands of lock requests and nearly $3B in loans every month.

Founder and CEO, Adam Carmel, told HousingWire that the company plans to use this funding to significantly scale its engineering team and bring additional talent on board to support its sales and marketing functions. Carmel also said this round will assist in future product development, including the expansion of its recently released data and analytics platform.

Polly previously integrated its Loan Trading Exchange with Freddie Mac's Cash‑Released XChange in 2020 and the GSE's Loan Selling Advisor in 2019, the year Polly was founded. The platform essentially uses cloud‑native technology that connects buyers and sellers of mortgage loans through its API integration.

"Our ultimate goal, what we are trying to solve for, is to take things that are effectively offline like spreadsheets, emails, phone calls — the former and antiquated way of doing business — and bringing it into a unified, orchestrated platform that enables our customers' success," Carmel said.

As part of this funding round, 8VC founding partner Alex Kolicich and Meritech Capital partner Max Motschwiller will join Polly's board of directors. Carmel said that he and Kolicich have known each other for some time, and it was in looking for ways to work together that eventually led to Polly's Series A. But 8VC is no stranger to the mortgage market. The firm invested in digital giants Qualia and Blend in previous years. Both companies achieved "unicorn" status in 2020.

"There is a technology challenge that mortgage lenders and investors are not well positioned to solve on their own," explained Kolicich. "Polly's modern, data‑driven platform is fundamentally changing the way the entire mortgage capital markets industry operates."