N.Y.-Based Startup Title Company Receives $4.5M in Venture Funding to Fuel Expansion
May 31, 2017
New York-based startup title company Spruce received $4.5 million in financing as it plans to expand across the United States by the end of the year.
Spruce was founded by two former employees of Betterment, a wealth management company. Patrick Burns, former product manager at Betterment, is the company’s chief executive officer, while Andrew Weisgall, former head of data science at Betterment, is the chief operating officer at Spruce. The company raised the $4.5 million in its Series A financing primarily from Bessemer Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and Third Prime Capital.
In a blog post, Burns said Spruce will apply technology with a customer-centric focus to deliver a “new kind of title and closing service.”
“Title companies are far less efficient than they could be at doing that work,” Burns wrote on his blog. “The research, processing, escrow and closing that comprise a title company’s role in ensuring and insuring that a real estate transaction is legally effective are often extremely manual, paper based processes. That means they’re more costly than they need to be, more error prone, subject to increasing amounts of fraud, and provide a slower and more opaque process for borrowers than might otherwise be possible.”
Currently, the company operates in 11 states.
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