Homium Raises $10M Series A and Tokenizes First Home Equity Loans on Avalanche Blockchain

April 16, 2024
By
Homium, Inc.

Already live in Colorado, Homium’s platform launch marks the latest chapter in tokenized asset innovation and on-chain finance.

Homium, Inc., a home equity mortgage lender and securitization platform, has launched its tokenized home equity loans on Avalanche. Homium’s shared appreciation mortgage provides homeowners with a novel way to borrow against their home equity without increasing their monthly debt burden. The first loans are live in Colorado, and the platform aims to expand to several other states. Through its platform and partnership with Securitize, Homium also offers a new investable asset to institutional investors via digital securities backed by homeowner equity designed to provide returns based on residential home price appreciation.

To further develop the platform and scale its lending business, Homium raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by the Sorenson Impact Group and Blizzard, the Avalanche Ecosystem Fund. Also advising Homium is ATLAS SP Partners, which launched in early February 2023 following Apollo Global’s acquisition of Credit Suisse’s Securitized Products Group.

“The technical advancements behind Homium are compelling, and we eagerly anticipate witnessing its integration into the residential securitization market,” said Jay Kim, CEO of ATLAS SP Partners.

Homium’s blockchain-native format and transparent terms make its home equity offering unique as a product for both homeowners and investors. Instead of paying interest or monthly payments, homeowners commit a portion of their home’s price appreciation, potentially unlocking equity for home improvements, debt consolidation, or passing on to their kids. Investors receive a tokenized asset tracking the price appreciation of a pool of shared appreciation home loans issued in real-time on the Homium platform. The result is a potentially powerful new financial product that may help free up historically trapped home equity and address housing affordability issues in a variety of scenarios. 

“The reason we are so passionately committed to this concept is we believe it will play a critical role in the future of attainable housing,” said David Battany, executive vice president, Capital Markets for Guild Mortgage. “It provides a materially lower monthly payment, which keeps more money in the borrower’s pockets, improves their financial position and promotes sustainable home ownership.”

Shared equity investments like Homium are a way for institutional investors to effectively partner with families and local governments to bolster homeownership and middle-class wealth creation, while reducing housing inequity and displacement. For this reason, Homium potential has attracted social impact partners, such as Realize Impact and Sorenson Impact Group.

“Homium is building a valuable new asset class for institutional investors, providing a new source of uncorrelated, inflation protected return in their core portfolios. For the first-time, institutions can invest side-by-side with homeowners, doing well and while doing good” said Tommy Mercein, CEO of Homium. 

The Homium platform unites the parties needed to offer shared appreciation mortgage loans to homeowners and issue a standardized, fungible digital asset backed by a pool of those mortgages to qualified investors at scale. Homium’s unique loan origination platform streamlines and automates the lending process by combining reliable data integration, intelligent valuation, and highly auditable origination protocols in an open business ecosystem for participating mortgage originators. Guild Mortgage, an industry leading mortgage originator and servicer, is working with Homium to offer their shared appreciation mortgage loans through the platform in Colorado with the intent to expand to multiple states.

“Homeownership is the foundation of financial security for most Americans; it has been, and continues to be, the gateway to the American dream,'' said Jim Sorenson, chairman of the Sorenson Impact Group. 

“As a social impact investor, we are most enthusiastic about how Homium will help enable more equitable and fair access to capital for economically disadvantaged homeowners,” said Matt Eldridge, Executive Director of Realize Impact.

The potential to upgrade components of the real estate industry through blockchain has been discussed since the technology’s early days. Over the past year and a half, the blockchain industry has witnessed a resurgence in focus on asset tokenization and the associated potential in on-chain finance, with Avalanche leading the charge. Homium marks the latest chapter in this story. 

For more information, visit Homium.io.

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About Homium

Homium Inc. helps homeowners and investors achieve their home financing goals by using patented technology to monetize and securitize owner-occupied home equity at scale. Homium leverages capital markets to unlock home equity through a fair and transparent product that puts homeowners’ interests first. Homium enables individual homeowners to “sell” a slice of their primary residence, by taking out an on-title second mortgage in the form of a shared appreciation mortgage loan, which Homium then pools with other loans in an investment vehicle to offer a tokenized security to investors. For the first time, investors are able to gain exposure to home price appreciation at scale, in a uniform and tradable format. Homium loans are currently available in Colorado. For more information about Homium, visit https://Homium.io/.

About Ava Labs

Ava Labs makes it simple to launch decentralized finance applications on Avalanche, the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry. We are empowering people to easily and freely digitize all the world’s assets on one open, programmable blockchain platform.

Ava Labs was founded by Cornell computer scientists who brought on talent from Wall Street to execute their vision. The company has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital, with angel investments from Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant.

Website | Whitepapers | Twitter | Discord | GitHub | Documentation | Forum | Telegram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | YouTube

About Blizzard Ecosystem Fund

Blizzard is a $200M+ fund accelerating development, growth, and innovation across the Avalanche ecosystem and beyond composed of contributions from the Avalanche Foundation, Ava Labs, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital, CMS Holdings, Republic Capital, amongst others.

About Avalanche

Avalanche is a smart contracts platform that scales infinitely and regularly finalizes transactions in less than one second. Its novel consensus protocol, Subnet infrastructure, and HyperSDK toolkit enable Web3 developers to easily launch powerful, custom blockchain solutions. Build anything you want, any way you want, on the eco-friendly blockchain designed for Web3 devs.

Website | Whitepapers | Twitter | Discord | GitHub | Documentation | Telegram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | YouTube

About Sorenson Impact Group

The Sorenson Impact Group catalyzes intentional, scalable and equitable investing to help solve unprecedented global challenges. We offer solutions and tools the impact market needs to scale and succeed. The team brings the investment know-how and networks to accelerate an ecosystem focused on delivering competitive returns alongside real impact.

We are grounded in the thesis that superior returns and measurable impact are not mutually exclusive. We believe our impact approach will drive both long-term value creation for our investors and positive outcomes in our communities.

About ATLAS SP Partners

ATLAS SP Partners is a global investment firm providing tailored solutions, industry expertise and execution certainty on asset-backed financing and capital markets activities that fuel business innovation and growth. ATLAS SP Partners offers a suite of flexible solutions across asset-backed warehouse financing, forward flow and asset purchase, and capital markets and distribution services. Companies of all maturities, from early-stage growth to large public companies, operating across real estate, corporate and consumer financing turn to ATLAS SP Partners for capital and advisory solutions. To learn more, please visit www.atlas-sp.com.

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MEDIA CONTACT

Homium, Inc.:

pressbox@homium.io

Ava Labs:

press@avalabs.org

ATLAS SP Partners:

info@atlas-sp.com

Sorenson Group:

lindsay@thesorensongroup.com

Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security.  Any such offer will be made solely pursuant to a private placement memorandum and only to qualified investors.

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Homium, Inc.

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Homium makes home equity accessible for homeowners and creates a new institutional asset class that permanently changes the game.

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