AINEWS
Blockchain based fintech Figure takes Kiavi's origination platform, which feeds Figure's marketplace, while a separate joint venture with private investment firm Sixth Street absorbs the credit risk on the loan production routed through Figure's
Figure Technology Solutions is paying $717 million for Kiavi. Figure gets the technology and origination platform. The loan portfolio, the part that holds the credit risk, goes to a joint venture with Sixth Street.
The split lets Figure book $7 billion-plus in new annual first-lien origination volume and project first-lien share of its consumer loan marketplace to 40 percent-plus in full-year 2027, up from roughly 20 percent today, without holding the underlying credit. The joint venture absorbs the credit; Figure keeps the routing layer, the borrower interface, and the data.
Figure announced the deal on June 10. The Federal Trade Commission granted early termination of the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period on July 21, clearing U.S. antitrust review.
Kiavi is the largest U.S. Residential Transition Loan (RTL) lender by 2025 production, according to the Scotsman Guide 2026 Top Private Lenders ranking. RTLs are short-term bridge loans that fund a borrower's down payment on a new home before the existing home sells; DSCR loans underwrite rental property against the property's debt-service coverage rather than the borrower's income. Both products feed directly into Figure's marketplace.
Kiavi CEO Arvind Mohan framed the transaction as a marriage of datasets and a "technology-forward strategy" in the Scotsman Guide interview. Figure said Adaptor, its agentic AI product, would make Kiavi's asset class the first use case for fully agent-to-agent borrower onboarding. Both sides of the trade are agents; the marketplace in the middle takes the spread.
The deal's structure reframes a question the industry has been asking for two years. The standard debate is whether blockchain-native lending can eat traditional mortgage origination. The deal points to a different unit of account in lending: the platform, with capital as a commodity input that can be rented from a balance-sheet partner.
Figure's press release also claims the company accounts for roughly 75 percent of real-world asset tokenization, a self-attributed figure that has not been independently corroborated. For the routing-layer reading to hold, Figure's marketplace needs to actually route originated loans to external capital partners rather than warehouse them on its own books.
Investors bought roughly three of every ten U.S. homes in 2025, per data from Cotality cited in the Scotsman Guide coverage, as the first-lien purchase market contracted under elevated rates. Kiavi's product mix, transition loans and DSCR rentals, is built for the buyer cohort that traditional mortgage underwriting is leaving behind. Routing that volume through a marketplace rather than a balance sheet lets the originating entity scale with the cycle.
The falsifier is concrete. If a future Figure 8-K, Democratized Prime disclosure, or quarterly marketplace volume report shows Figure repricing originated loans onto its own balance sheet rather than the Sixth Street venture, the routing-layer reading breaks. If the joint venture's volume tracks the projected $100 million-plus per month into Democratized Prime through 2026 and 2027, the platform-and-balance-sheet split holds, and the next acquisition of this shape, fintech buying lender with capital parked in a separate vehicle, becomes the template.