- Blooma, this company automates AI-driven decision making to reduce the time, cost, and risk associated with commercial loan origination, announced it raised $2.75 million
Blooma — a company that automates AI-driven decision making to reduce the time, cost, and risk associated with commercial loan origination — announced that it has launched with a $2.75 million seed round led by Floodgate. The company has a mission to transform the lending experience for commercial and private lenders and other organizations.
The seed funding will also be used to further build the engineering, operations, product, marketing, and sales infrastructure while moving toward scaling the business for accelerated growth.
Abstract Ventures, Crescent Ridge Partners, and Serra Ventures also joined the round. Floodgate partner Arjun Chopra has taken a board seat at the company in conjunction with the funding round. Chopra is joining Blooma co-founder and chairman Michael Persall and co-founder and CEO Shayne Skaff on the board.
Blooma had originally launched its production module in May 2019. And the company offers the AI-driven platform designed to take commercial lenders from the point of the borrower’s request all the way to the credit memo stage without manual intervention. Plus the early users of the platform have been able to reduce loan origination time and costs by as much as 75%.
“The Blooma platform improves lending profitability and quickly aligns lenders with desired borrower profiles, enabling them to make better decisions and speed the overall origination process, from prioritizing the right deals, to creating configurable workflows and risk settings, to driving simplicity and productivity throughout every stage of the complex commercial lending process,” said Skaff. “In early use cases, our commercial lending customers are experiencing significant improvements in time to revenue.”
Blooma’s target customers include lending organizations like commercial and private banks with $1 billion or more in commercial real estate assets. And Blooma is aiming to license the Blooma platform to these lenders, enabling customization that meets each customer’s precise requirements for borrower profiles, compliance preferences, sales pipeline management, etc.
“We are excited about our recent implementation of Blooma. The ability to manage our loan pipeline in a more efficient and automated manner drives better, faster decision making, resulting in improved overall experience for our customers and healthier loan quality for the bank,” added A.J. Moyer — the CEO of C3bank. “Also, the asset valuation module is a real game-changer for our underwriting process. The ability to get instant feedback on commercial real estate valuations early on in the underwriting process will allow us to make better loan decisions throughout the organization, resulting in higher quality loans and overall profitability for the bank.”
As a founder and chairman of ABP Capital and C3bank, Persall has extensive experience in commercial lending. Skaff spent over a decade as co-founder and president of MaintenanceNet (acquired by Cisco in 2015). And Blooma CTO Shy Block is an accomplished technology pioneer and skilled entrepreneur with a 28-year track record of delivering big data, AI, and machine learning systems.
Prior to the seed funding, Blooma was self-funded through Mooring Ventures (Skaff’s boutique investment firm) and ABP Capital (Persall’s privately capitalized financing company). The idea for Blooma was initiated when Persall approached Skaff to help build a platform to automate his commercial loan origination business.
After several months of evaluation, research, and market analysis, Skaff decided to build the SaaS platform through The Sandbox — which is an incubator and accelerator organization he founded to nurture innovation for AI and machine learning technologists.
