Blend

Overview

This profile covers Blend Labs, Inc. — the San Francisco financial-software company listed on the New York Stock Exchange as BLND — not the various unrelated businesses that share the name. Blend builds a cloud-based digital origination platform for banks, credit unions and mortgage lenders, spanning mortgages, consumer loans and deposit accounts and helping institutions streamline workflows from application to close (Reuters). Co-founded in 2012 by Nima Ghamsari, a former employee of analytics giant Palantir Technologies, it rode the pandemic-era lending boom to a $360 million IPO in July 2021 (Reuters) — then spent the 2022 rate shock unwinding the acquisition that the boom had funded.

The platform

Blend’s software digitizes the banking experience end to end, “from the moment they start an application for a loan or a deposit account to the moment they digitally sign the final documents,” as Reuters described it at the IPO (Reuters). The company describes itself as a digital origination platform whose suite covers mortgage and consumer banking — home equity, deposit accounts, credit cards, personal lending and auto lending — with Blend Builder letting customers configure custom workflows from pre-built components (Reuters). The platform also embeds third-party technology, data and service providers, including a marketplace of insurance carriers and settlement agencies (Reuters). One measure of its institutional standing: housing-finance giant Fannie Mae has integrated data from Blend into its underwriting program, using it to help lenders evaluate borrowers’ rental payment history when approving home loans (Reuters).

The IPO and the money behind it

Blend filed confidentially for its listing in April 2021, targeting a valuation of nearly $4 billion and seeking to raise up to $360 million; it had last been valued at $3.3 billion after a January funding round (Reuters). The offering priced 20 million Class A shares at the upper end of its $16–$18 range, with Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company and Wells Fargo Securities as lead underwriters (Reuters). On the first day of trading the shares opened at $20.00 and closed at $20.90 (Global Venturing). The underwriters held a 30-day option to buy another 3 million shares, which could have pushed the offering to $420 million (Global Venturing).

The IPO capped a fast pre-public funding sprint: Salesforce Ventures invested in May 2019, Temasek and General Atlantic co-led a $130 million Series E the following month, a $75 million Series F in August 2020 valued the company at $1.7 billion, and Coatue Management and Tiger Global co-led a $300 million Series G in January 2021 — with earlier backing from Greylock, Emergence Capital, 8VC, Lightspeed, Founders Fund, Formation 8, Nyca Partners and Andreessen Horowitz (Global Venturing). Timothy Mayopoulos, the former chief executive of Fannie Mae, served as president through the listing (Reuters).

The refi bust

Just before going public, Blend paid $422 million to acquire Title365, a national title insurance and settlement services provider, from Mr. Cooper Group (Inman). The deal supercharged 2021 revenue — up 144% to $234.5 million — but operating expenses rose 129% to $313.2 million, and headcount ballooned from 577 at the start of the year to 2,276 by its end, including 587 Title365 employees in Chennai, India (Inman).

Then rates rose. Fannie Mae economists forecast refinancings would fall roughly 80% from 2020’s $2.8 trillion, and Blend — whose title business was “driven heavily by refinance,” in the words of executive Marc Greenberg — laid off 200 employees, about 10% of its workforce, in April 2022, shedding $34.5 million in annual payroll costs (Inman). Ghamsari told staff the company was “renewing our focus on the technology that got us here” — the software platform — while cutting the operational businesses that had grown up around the refi boom (Inman).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not state Blend’s financial results or market position after 2022; no fully-read independent sources covering later years were found.
• It does not describe Title365’s later history (including any impairments or divestiture); those were not verified from fully-read sources.
• It does not state current headcount, revenue or product lineup; the figures above are the most recent verified in the sources read.
• It does not take a view on Blend’s investment merits; the stock-analysis aggregator pages in the SERP were not used as sources.