Tidalwave just stepped out of the New York fog with a $22M Series A, and the move feels less like a funding round and more like the moment a quiet current turns into something lenders can feel under their feet. Permanent Capital led the round with D.R. Horton and Engineering Capital riding in, and the total raise hits $24M. When a company named Tidalwave pulls in the nation’s largest homebuilder as both investor and enterprise customer through DHI Mortgage and CEO Mark Winter, you can tell the waterline is about to rise for the entire mortgage ecosystem.
What makes this moment different is not the size of the check but the weight of the founders behind it. Diane Yu built FreeWheel into a platform Comcast acquired for roughly $360M before stepping in as CTO at Better.com. Jack Deng architected FreeWheel’s core systems for more than a decade before becoming Distinguished Engineer at Better. Cheng Li did his time at Google on Cloud Bigtable and then engineered origination systems at Better. These are the types of builders who understand what actually breaks inside a mortgage workflow because they’ve spent years fixing the pipes.
Tidalwave’s SOLO platform hits the industry like a well-timed bassline, dual AUS with DU and LPA running in sync, real-time verification through Plaid, Argyle, Truv, and AccountChek. Agentic AI that handles verification and underwriting tasks without drifting into hallucinations. A voice-to-application engine that can turn a conversation into a file. Spanish language support live today with 30+ languages on deck. Every feature pushes lenders closer to a world where a 500-page file and a 43-day close feel like artifacts from a different era.
The traction is already loud, NEXA Lending deployed the platform enterprise-wide in August 2025. First Colony Mortgage and Mortgage Solutions signed on earlier in the year. With the new capital, Tidalwave is targeting 200,000+ loans annually by 2026, roughly 4% of the projected $1.46T market. That kind of volume is not ambition for ambition’s sake, it is the math of what happens when you remove $1,500 in costs per loan and erase 70% of manual tasks that hold lenders hostage.
There is a bigger story here. Spanish-speaking borrowers hold $1.7T in buying power, yet 23% say language blocks them from the mortgage process. Tidalwave is not preaching inclusion, it is engineering it into the product. If Limited English Proficiency households reach a 45.6% homeownership rate, nearly 300,000 new homeowners enter the fold. That is not a statistic, that is impact disguised as infrastructure.
Credit to Diane Yu, Jack Deng, and Cheng Li for building a system that feels less like tech disruption and more like long-overdue modernization. Permanent Capital, D.R. Horton, and Engineering Capital saw the shift early, and now the rest of the industry will feel the pull. The tide is moving, and this time the current has code behind it.
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