Renofi To Expand Ai-powered Renovation Financing After $22m Series B Funding

RenoFi, an end-to-end financing platform built exclusively for home renovations, announced Tuesday that it closed a $22 million Series B funding round led by Fifth Wall and participation from Progressive Insurance and other new investors.

In addition to their financial backing, Fifth Wall and Progressive Insurance join RenoFi as strategic partners, a move the company said underscores growing homeowner demand for renovation-specific financing solutions. The funding brings RenoFi’s total capital raised to $65 million.

The Series B offering also drew support from HighSage Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Flintlock Capital and Gaingels, with continued participation from existing backers Canaan, First Round Capital, Curql and TruStage Ventures. It also involved a network of credit union partners, including Ardent Credit Union, Chartway Credit Union, First Community Credit Union and USALLIANCE Financial.

“The Series B financing will propel RenoFi’s profitable growth trajectory,” RenoFi said in a press release.

RenoFi plans to more than triple its retail team of renovation financing specialists over the next year while expanding partnerships with credit unions and embedded financing platforms. The company is also accelerating development of its platform, which pairs modern credit underwriting with a proprietary, AI-enabled renovation underwriting engine to unlock after repair value (ARV) financing.

Founded in 2018 by Justin Goldman, Robert Shedd and Lee Miller, RenoFi partners with credit union lenders nationwide to offer the Renovation HELOC, the first U.S. home equity line of credit based on a property’s ARV rather than its current value.

“Millions of homeowners want to renovate, but many lack the equity to borrow what they need,” said Goldman, the CEO of RenoFi. “Robert, Lee and I built RenoFi to fix that. By creating the world’s first Renovation HELOC, building technology for the incredibly manual mortgage process, and partnering with a network of trusted credit unions, we’ve made it possible for homeowners to fund their dream projects without draining savings, racking up high-interest-rate debt or giving up their low-rate mortgage.

“This new capital will allow us to meaningfully scale our team, grow embedded financing partnerships, and help millions of more families to turn renovation plans into reality.”

Since its inception, RenoFi has facilitated more than 8,000 renovation loans, totaling more than $1.5 billion in funded loans and $2 billion in analyzed renovation project value through its proprietary platform. The company is now licensed in 48 states and attracts more than 10,000 new homeowners per month, the company said.

“RenoFi is transforming how homeowners finance and ultimately plan renovations,” said Dan Wenhold, partner at Fifth Wall. “By enabling unmatched access to capital, particularly for the underserved segment of equity-light homeowners, RenoFi is making more renovations possible and unlocking growth across the $500 billion home improvement market. We are excited to partner with RenoFi to help them accelerate this momentum.”

Funding to support RenoFi’s goals

In an interview with HousingWire, Goldman and Miller discussed how the funding will advance RenoFi’s goals and specifically enhance the company’s distributed retail endeavors.

“We will be continuing to invest in our platform, and as we strive to build a fully automated, end-to-end renovation underwrite … this fundraising certainly will accelerate that effort and continue to build our lead in this space,” Goldman said.

“We sort of stumbled upon distributed retail as a channel for RenoFi, and it has just been going so much better than we ever thought,” he added. “And so a big part of this fundraiser was tripling down on that effort and really making that a core area of growth for us. So we are looking to bring in close to 100 people this year to join that team.”

Goldman also discussed RenoFi’s investment in loan officer tools.

“One metric that we’re hoping to achieve is when a loan officer comes and joins RenoFi, that within 24 months, they more than double their business. So that’s something that we are pretty confident in, and that this funding is enabling us to do.”

Miller and Goldman each said that RenoFi’s status as a credit union service organization (CUSO) gives loan officers a “leg up” from competitors.

“Typically, loan officers working at big mortgage banks don’t have access to credit union products, and so by coming to RenoFi, not only do they have access to a unique set of renovation loans to help them compete in an area they hadn’t previously been able to compete in, but also [be able to access] the generic products that we have from our credit unions,” Goldman said.

“We have built a network of these nonprofit credit unions who work directly with us to serve our homeowners, which allows us to provide the lowest rates and fees to homeowners across the country, because we’re able to pretty much take a local credit union and provide that at a national scale,” Miller added.