Mortgagetech player UpEquity landed $50 million this week to help democratize home buying. The investment brings the Texas-based company’s total funding to $76.7 million in combined debt and equity.

The Series B round, which consisted of $20 million in equity and $30 million in debt, was led by 3 Ventures with participation from Next Coast Ventures, BP Capital Management, Alumni Ventures, Gaingels, Launchpad Capital, and Early Light Ventures.

UpEquity was founded in 2019 and, simply put, is a digital mortgage provider. The company offers three main products for potential homebuyers. Buy with Cash helps average homebuyers make all-cash offers on a home, Buy Before You Sell enables buyers to purchase a new home before selling their current one, and UpEquity’s third solution enables homeowners to refinance their existing mortgage.

For the end consumers, the cost of getting a mortgage from UpEquity is similar to costs they would incur with a traditional mortgage lender. UpEquity aims to compete by not only helping buyers make an all-cash offer, but also by doing so quickly. UpEquity’s average time-to-close is 18 days.

“At the end of the day, our vision is to create equal access to the American dream through frictionless, on-demand homebuying, and it starts with bringing technology into the underwriting process,” said UpEquity Co-Founder and CEO Tim Herman. “By removing cost and inefficiencies from the mortgage process, our customers can make all-cash offers at zero cost to them and still get access to competitive interest rates. They get the best of both worlds.”

UpEquity is part of a newly emerging set of companies called Power Buyers that purchase a home on a buyer’s behalf using cash, then sell it back to them using a traditional mortgage. Rivals in this space include Knock, Homeward, Orchard, and Blend. Like these players, UpEquity makes money on interest paid on the mortgage and commissions from reselling loans.

UpEquity’s revenue has grown 500% year-over-year. The company anticipates it will originate more than $1 billion in mortgages over the next 12 months.

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CRED, the members-only credit card management platform that rewards users for paying their credit card bills, has landed $251 million in funding this week. The Series E round boosts the India-based company’s total raised to $722 million and increases its valuation to just over $4 billion.

The round was led by existing investors and private equity firms Tiger Global and Falconedge. DST Global, Insight Partners, Coatue, Sofina, RTP, and Dragoneer also contributed. New investors Marshall Wace and Steadfast also joined the round.

CRED, which did not disclose its plans for the investment, launched its online bill payment platform in 2018. The company incentivizes its 7.5 million members to pay their bills on time to improve their credit score. If the user pays on time, CRED sends them CRED Coins they can use to earn rewards or receive access to curated products and experiences.

The Bangalore-based company launched a new product called CRED X IPL last month. The new offering allows members to use their CRED Coins to shop at the CRED Store, book stays on CRED Travel, receive exclusive rewards and cashback, and access offers when they shop online. CRED X IPL also incorporates a competitive aspect; users are pitted against each other on a leaderboard and the one at the top each month receives a jackpot prize.

CRED also counts itself as a fintech investor. The company recently invested $5 million in CredAvenue, a digital platform that helps investors discover, trade, execute, and fulfill debt solutions. CRED is also in talks to invest in Uni, a startup that aims to make credit cards more accessible.

Pagos, a startup that provides intelligent payment infrastructure for commerce, is placing its stakes in the payment space today. The newly-minted company landed $10 million in a round led by Underscore VC and Point72 Ventures that also included participation from Amit Jhawar, Bill Ready, Billy Chen, and Rich LaBarca.

Pagos will use the funds to build out its team with more engineers.

Company founders Klas Bäck, Albert Drouart, and Daniel Blomberg launched the company earlier this year to help businesses optimize their payment infrastructure by integrating Pagos’ API micro-services into their payments stack.

Pagos offers a range of four products to help understand and build a better payment infrastructure. Offerings include Parrot, which provides enhanced Issuer Identification Number or bank identification number data; Peacock, which connects to business’ processors to provide payment analysis and optimization tools; Canary, which detects patterns and predicts opportunities from customer data; and Toucan, an API to integrate network tokenization into any payment stack.

“The challenge we saw pretty much for every one of our customers was that they didn’t have enough knowledge, not enough data and not enough tools to be able to execute a strategy around payment processing or know how to optimize it,” Bäck told TechCrunch. “This means they are a lot slower and they have a much harder time doing all the things they need to do and producing the results they want.”

Pagos holds a lot of promise, and not only because of consumers’ recent shift to online shopping and digital payments. As Chris Gardner, partner at Boston-based Underscore VC explained, “…their potential market is every e-commerce merchant in the world — and there are millions of them. Those are two potent ingredients in a winning recipe.” Additionally, company Founders Bäck and Drouart have both held senior leadership roles at PayPal for almost a decade, while Blomberg has launched seven startups, five of which were acquired, over his career.

Photo by Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa on Unsplash