DeFi Development Corp.
For the period ended Dec 31, 2024. Filed Mar 27, 2025.
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FY2024 · Filed Mar 27, 2025
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Item 1. Business
Overview
Janover is an AI-powered online platform that connects the commercial real estate industry by providing data and software subscriptions as well as value-add services to multifamily and commercial property professionals as we connect the increasingly complex ecosystem that stakeholders have to manage. We provide a technology platform that connects commercial mortgage and small business borrowers looking for debt to refinance, build, or buy commercial property including apartment buildings to commercial property lenders. These property lenders include traditional banks, credit unions, real estate investment trusts (“REITs”), debt funds, and other financial institutions looking to deploy capital into commercial mortgages. We currently serve hundreds of thousands of web users annually, including multifamily and commercial property owners and developers applying for billions of dollars of debt financing per year, professional service providers, and thousands of multifamily and commercial property lenders including more than 10% of the banks in America, credit unions, REITs, debt funds, Fannie Mae® and Freddie Mac® multifamily lenders, FHA multifamily lenders, commercial mortgage-backed securities (“CMBS”) lenders, Small Business Administration (“SBA”) lenders, and more.
We have developed an AI-enabled, B2B fintech platform that connects commercial borrowers and lenders, with a human touch. Commercial property owners, operators, and developers can quickly create an account on our platform, chat with our AI, set up their own profile and submit and manage loan requests on their dashboard in a digital experience. Our algorithms automatically match borrowers to their best loan option(s) or to our internal capital markets advisors (inbound sales team) that guide the borrower through the process and connect them with the right loan product and lender. Originators that work at commercial real estate mortgage lenders can log in and use their lender portal to view, sort, and engage with their new matches in real-time and communicate with the borrowers, tracking their loans right through our portal; they can setup the types of deals they are looking for as well. Our capital markets advisors have their own interface that gives them access to targeted loan opportunities, market intelligence, and data empowering them to better assist borrowers in managing their choices, leading to the best possible outcomes for both lenders and borrowers while building trust, all of which enhances our brand.
We currently have two different customer segments: lenders and borrowers. Borrowers include, but are not limited to, owners, operators, and developers of commercial real estate including multifamily properties and most recently, a growing segment of small business owners. Lenders include banks, credit unions, REITs, Fannie Mae® and Freddie Mac® multifamily lenders, FHA® multifamily lenders, debt funds, CMBS lenders, and SBA lenders.
Our business model includes earning a transaction fee each time a loan closes with a lender through our platform. We are either paid a share of the revenue from the transaction by the lender and/or receive some fixed sum in an amount we negotiate from the borrower. We are generally paid by the lender or the borrower and are paid by both sometimes. Our average fee earned per transaction is approximately 1% of the loan amount generally earned at the time of closing. We do not make loans or share risk with the lenders, with whom we conduct business with.
The Company derives its revenue primarily from platform fees and subscription revenue. Platform fees include referral and advisory fees generated from multifamily and commercial real estate and small business debt transactions. Revenue is recognized when performance obligations under the terms of a contract with a customer are satisfied and the promised services have been transferred to the customer. The Company’s services are generally transferred to the customer at a point in time, which is when the underlying lending transaction has closed and successfully funded. The Company may act as an agent for both lenders and borrowers.
Our data and software offerings are generally offered on a subscription basis as software as a service (“SaaS”). Subscription revenue is derived from the following:
| ● | Janover Pro, which was launched in 2024, is our online SaaS marketplace for multifamily and commercial real estate loans providing an online matching service where borrowers or brokers can shop their loans, and lenders can provide financing to borrowers. Our customer pays for subscriptions, which are generally on annual contracts, and we generate revenue from SaaS subscription fees, which are recognized over time, throughout the term of the customer contract. |
| ● | Janover Connect, formerly known as Groundbreaker, which was acquired in 2023, is a real estate syndication software and investor portal, which primarily derives its revenue from SaaS subscription fees, which are recognized over time, throughout the term of the customer contract. Janover Connect is a specialized SaaS platform designed to simplify capital fundraising and investment administration in the commercial real estate industry. By offering an intuitive portal, it enables commercial real estate professionals to efficiently manage equity capital, investor relations, and document sharing, fostering a seamless and professional investment experience. The platform also facilitates secure financial transactions and offers robust customer relationship management tools, aiming to enhance transparency and engagement between property developers and investors. |
| ● | Janover Insurance, which was launched in 2024. This Insurtech subsidiary derives revenue from subscriptions pertaining to annual insurance premium commissions received, which are recognized at the start of the annual term, when the insurance coverage is bound. |
| ● | Janover Engage, which is our equity marketplace, was launched in 2024. Janover Engage is a SaaS platform designed to connect real estate owners, operators, and sponsors raising capital using Reg D 506(c) with potential accredited investors. Janover Engage provides general partners tools to market their offering and a platform on which to showcase it, making it easier for them to raise capital, build their pipeline, and focus on their next deal. Revenue is derived from the SaaS subscription fees, which are recognized over time, throughout the term of the customer contract. |
| ● | Janover AI, which was also launched in 2024, is a generative AI platform that is trained on and programmed to understand the nuances of multifamily and commercial property capital markets, from debt, to equity, to operations. The revenue derived from these SaaS subscriptions will be recognized over the term of the SaaS agreement. |
During fiscal 2025, we will continue to focus on larger loan opportunities, which should increase our average loan size. In fiscal 2025, we will continue to focus on transitioning from transactional platform fee revenue to the more predictable and profitable recurring SaaS subscription revenue. At December 31, 2024 our annual recurring revenue (“ARR”) run-rate reached approximately $812,000, compared to approximately $276,000 in the prior year, an increase of 194%. As of December 31, 2024 and 2023, there was approximately $341,000 and $83,000 in deferred revenue, respectively, the majority of which is pertaining to these SaaS fees received in advance. The revenue will be recognized over the remaining term of the SaaS agreement in fiscal 2025 and beyond.
Strategy
In 2025, we will continue to better connect the commercial real estate industry by building tools that reduce frictions in transactions and that provide broader access to better data than entrenched incumbents. Our priorities are as follows:
| 1. | Scale annual recurring revenue (“ARR”) - We plan to build our sales and outbound marketing capabilities to increasingly focus on selling profitable subscription services on annual and multi-year contracts. Making revenue more predictable and aligning our incentives with those of our customers. |
| 2. | Expand net revenue retention (“NRR”) - The most important thing to do is to listen to the customer and to solve their problems. By focusing on NRR as a core metric, it forces us to concentrate on our customers needs and offer additional products. We can measure attrition and expansion revenue with NRR which will gauge the level of our success. |
| 3. | Expand average contract values (“ACV”) - We have the opportunity to expand ACVs and average deal size by focusing on where we are able to drive the most value and create even more value. By focusing on creating more value per touch, we naturally will expand ARR and NRR. |
All of this will be done by continuing to:
| 1. | Hire high-performing and aligned personnel to help us execute our strategy. |
| 2. | Invest in our platform and technology. |
| 3. | Cultivate a culture of creativity, hard work, innovation, curiosity, and community. |
Why Now
We believe we are in the early stages of the commercial mortgage lending digital adoption curve. If you think of the S-curve, digital adaption in the travel industry is very mature, at the upper right-hand quadrant of the “S,” having significantly disintermediated traditional travel agencies, consumer finance is flying up the somewhat vertical slope, and the commercial real estate finance industry is at that inflection point at the bottom of the S. We believe we can help accelerate that adaptation and ride the momentum at the same time.
Borrowers
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated prosumer (professional consumer) exposure to fintech and the benefits of innovations such as digital banking. At the same time, a younger generation that grew up immersed in technology is beginning to gain entry into commercial real estate - through family businesses, traditional corporate enterprises, and entrepreneurship. Commercial property owners, now more than ever, demand a better experience and more importantly, a better outcome. With a commodity financial product, the most important thing is that a borrower gets access to the best outcome that matches their needs, be it speed, leverage, rate, term, amortization, recourse, or usually, some combination thereof. We aim to get them connected to that product and provide first-class service throughout the process.
Lenders
Lenders were also exposed to the benefits and rapid adaptation (and risk of competition) from fintech entities that accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, due to the economic conditions resulting from the pandemic, commercial property lenders (banks, credit unions, REITS, debt funds, etc.) are flush with cash that they need to deploy.
Commercial and Multifamily
A flight to safety has driven investors to commercial property in droves and recent macro-economic events continue to support a focus on safety and yield. Most investors seek leverage from lenders to goose their returns. Investors also seek to capitalize on the tax benefits, long-term appreciation, and inflation-hedging benefits of owning multifamily and commercial property. We think we are uniquely positioned to help both commercial borrowers and lenders achieve their goals.
Our Solution
Our solution is a B2B fintech marketplace that connects commercial borrowers and lenders in a flexible ecosystem, with the human touch of a capital markets advisor. Said more simply, a platform where commercial property owners, operators, and developers can leverage technology to find a better commercial mortgage and where commercial mortgage bankers can leverage that same technology to find new and better-fit commercial mortgage loans.
Advisor Enabled
Our capital markets advisors are an important part of our business model. We believe that you can remove the intermediary from the transaction, but you cannot remove their functions, and although we think we can not only replicate but improve upon things like commercial property underwriting, lender matching, and loan processing, we believe the power of a human touch will always be invaluable in cultivating trust and relationships. As such, we aim to insert expert advisors into the transaction experience to allow borrowers and lenders the ability to have concierge-level support and advisory services as they work towards consummating a transaction. We think inserting a human touch into the transaction with an advisor improves the borrower experience and as a by-product improve conversion rates and revenue per account.
Borrowers can come to one of our websites or directly log into our portal, navigate to their dashboard, and submit or update their loan requests. Utilizing generative AI, our powerful algorithms automatically match those borrowers to the best lenders, right through the platform, or with the service of an in-house expert advisor, so that they can connect directly to the lender and a better commercial mortgage. When the loan closes, we get paid, generally by the lender but sometimes by the borrower.
Principal Products and Services
We have developed a flexible, two-sided, B2B fintech marketplace that connects commercial borrowers and lenders, with a human touch. Commercial property owners, operators, and developers can quickly create an account on our platform, set up their own profile and submit and manage loan requests on their dashboard in a digital experience. Our algorithms automatically match borrowers to their best loan option(s) or to our internal capital markets advisors that guide the borrower through the process and connect them with the right loan product and lender. Originators that work at commercial mortgage lenders can log in and use their lender portal to view, sort, and engage with their new matches in real-time and communicate with the borrowers, tracking their loans right through our portal. Capital markets advisors that work internally have their own interface that gives them access to targeted loan opportunities empowering them to better assist borrowers in managing their choices, leading to the best possible outcomes for both lenders and borrowers while building trust, all of which enhances our brand.
Business Plan
Our business model includes earning a transaction fee each time a loan closes through our platform. We are either paid a share of the revenue from the transaction by the lender; a percentage of the loan amount paid at closing by the borrower; or some combination of the two. However, as we scale, we expect the burden of payment to generally be shouldered by the lender. Our average fee earned per transaction is approximately 1% of the loan amount generally earned at the time of closing. We do not make loans or share any of the risk.
We currently have two different customer segments: lenders and borrowers. Borrowers include (but are not limited to) owners, operators, and developers of commercial real estate including multifamily properties and most recently, a growing segment of small business owners (which we believe represents a significant growth opportunity). Lenders include small banks, credit unions, REITs, Fannie Mae® and Freddie Mac® multifamily lenders, FHA® multifamily lenders, debt funds, CMBS lenders, SBA lenders, and more. Our job is to obsessively focus on improving the experience and value for our two customer segments.
During fiscal 2025, we will continue to focus on larger loan opportunities, which should increase our average loan size. In fiscal 2025, we will continue to focus on transitioning from transactional platform fee revenue to the more predictable and profitable recurring SaaS subscription revenue.
Borrowers
Commercial property owners, operators, and developers are our core customers. They are online looking for information on their next loan be it for an acquisition, recapitalization, or future property development. Maybe they will buy a small strip mall in a large market like Miami or build a 300-unit apartment complex in a small market in a town in Alabama. We are there for them from research, to close, and back.
Borrower benefits include:
| ● | Free education. This is at the core of our value proposition to all commercial property borrowers. Whether or not someone intends to transact on our platform, we want to provide borrowers with all the free advice and education we can to make them more informed and more powerful prosumers. Sometimes we hear from lenders as well, thanking us for the easy-to-access, complete, and well-organized online information available on a variety of multifamily, business, and commercial property loan products and topics. We know the commercial real estate industry is opaque and we can provide transparency and education to a complicated transaction process. |
| ● | New supply. We aim to build the largest functional, aggregate supply of commercial property lenders in America, and then, perhaps, the world. Functional is an operative word here. We believe we can leverage data and technology to make this digital supply in our marketplace of maximum utility to our borrower-customers thereby delivering deep value to all the stakeholders in our ecosystem. We believe that in the future, we will be able to leverage AI to deliver improved experiences and outcomes to all of our customers as our dataset grows. |
| ● | Capital Markets Advisor. As we grow, we aim to hire more expert advisors to help make the process more efficient and more intimate for commercial mortgage borrowers and lenders, ultimately matching the best of technology with the best of human touch. We intend to leave the data-driven, automated work to the machines combined with the experience of our capital markets advisors. |
| ● | Aligned. Borrowers have access to our portal for free. In many cases, they do not even pay us when they transact if it is with a premier lender, and if they do pay us, it is because the loan they are getting is better than what their traditional mortgage broker or banker could provide, in a lower friction process. |
Lenders
Our lenders are a material component of creating a two-sided market and without our lenders, there is no two-sided marketplace. Beyond that, they are a critical customer to whom we aim to deliver significant and long-term value. Many fintechs are making loans and becoming lenders that are competing with banks, credit unions, and other lenders. We want to empower lenders, making them more productive and efficient, by presenting them with high quality loan opportunities. We aim to partner and grow with our lender network over time.
We have two classes of lenders:
| 1. | Premier Lenders: Our premier lenders are lenders with whom we have an arrangement that allows us to share their fee income (i.e., origination, trade premium, and servicing). Our long-term aim with these relationships is to drive more business to premier lenders, less fees and costs to borrowers, and scaled economies shared to both. |
| 2. | Standard Lenders: Lenders with whom we do not have a pre-arranged fee agreement are standard lenders. We aim to build and rely on the most robust network of lenders in the country whom we may not have a particular fee-sharing arrangement with. We intend to invite these lenders to lender portal where they can easily build their profiles as originators under a particular lender’s brand as well as match, view, and manage loan opportunities through an easy-to-use tool. |
Lender benefits include:
| ● | Huge new audience. Traditionally, lenders, via their originators, have access to a finite audience that is limited to geography and relationships. Some larger and more established lenders have more significant reach, giving them an advantage over smaller, lesser-known lenders, even if those smaller lenders, like single-branch credit unions, for example, have more competitive commercial loan products, creating an adverse situation for small lenders who cannot access their ideal borrowers and eligible borrowers that do not have access to those smaller lenders with superior loan programs. Even in the case of the big banks, their primary strategy for closing more loan volume is hiring originators and bankers in new and existing markets. With our platform, we aim to open large and small lenders alike up to huge new digital audiences they didn’t have access to and highly curated deal flow in a portal that promotes productivity. As savvy property owners, buyers, and developers get online to find out what and who else is out there, our Lenders will be there, at the forefront. We think we can deliver a higher volume of better-qualified borrowers in an easier-to-manage system, making individual originators more productive, profitable, and satisfied. |
| ● | Access to borrowers ready to transact. When a lender is matched with a borrower on the Janover platform, it is not as simple as getting a “lead.” Each match is a data-driven, enriched, vetted opportunity with a commercial property owner, buyer, or developer that is ready to transact. Lenders get access to the highest-intent borrowers, often with robust and complete commercial loan packages. |
| ● | Performance-based acquisition strategy. Lenders can gain access to our portal for free. Premier lenders pay us when they transact, and originators at standard lenders pay nothing, they just have to deliver winning loan terms to borrowers and those borrowers pay us a small transaction fee at closing. We may offer premium subscriptions to lenders in the future. |
| ● | Happier, more productive originators. Not only do we drive demand to algorithmically matched and aligned lenders from high intent borrowers, but we also make software and tools that take frictions out of commercial loan processing, making originators happier and more productive. Part of our roadmap includes us continuing to enhance the loan analysis, underwriting, and origination experience for lenders. |
Growth Opportunities
Our unit economics are impressive, and we think we can continue to improve them as we scale. In such a large and fragmented market, we see many opportunities to accelerate growth. The four key categories are:
Top of funnel
A material part of what we believe to be our competitive advantage is our ability to attract users to our many websites. We refer to this as our top of funnel. This may be buyers early in the process of looking for commercial lending products or owners looking to replace their legacy lenders through commercial loan refinancing. The way we aim to scale our top of funnel strategy is to continue to lean into creating websites that are rich in useful content, easily accessible, responsive, fast, and highly targeted. We aim to hire more writers and subject-matter experts to provide unique and valuable content to our website users, helping them find and access the best answers to their queries, faster than ever. We want to provide all the information these borrowers are looking for in an easy to navigate format and use that to drive account creation on our platform and brand development. We’ve used our formula to create multiple websites that perform very well on search engines, and we believe we can use this formula to scale into more loan products than we are currently focused on. Right now, much of our effort has been around multifamily finance, but we believe we can use this strategy with office loans, retail loans, industrial loans, hotel loans, self-storage loans, small business loans, and more.
Borrower advisors
Right now, we are able to transact on our platform without the aid of an internal human, instantly matching commercial property borrowers with the right lenders, something that we believe gives us a significant structural cost advantage over incumbents. After many tests, we believe that by inserting a capital markets advisor in the process to help the borrower navigate options, and the lender access the opportunity, at the front end of the transaction, we can materially lift conversion rates, revenue per account, and the customer experience, without materially affecting our superior cost model.
Embedded finance and platform partnerships
Nearly all the transactions on our platform have originated from search through our top of funnel expertise. We believe we can press the accelerator by partnering with large real estate sales platforms, residential lending platforms, and other strategic partners, to be their “Get Financing” button or commercial property financing funnel, delivering a better loan and experience to their users, while sharing our economics with the platform partners. As we do not have to pay out high commissions due to our superior cost structure, we believe this can become a competitive advantage in the future. We have developed a proprietary affiliate portal that we aim to leverage to give our platform, and affiliate partners transparency in the process.
More lenders
One of the most straightforward ways to delight our borrowers is with more lenders (and, as in a two-sided marketplace, the most straightforward way to delight lenders and generate network effects is by adding more qualified borrowers). We are currently operating with only a small number of lenders on our platform, and we are working hard to build a beautiful and seamless experience for originators all over the country to join our marketplace and build out their profiles. We recently launched the first version of this, and it has been well received. We believe by scaling the supply side of our marketplace, we are going to be able to offer borrowers significantly more value than incumbents. Further, we aim to enhance our matching capabilities and algorithms to match borrowers with more and better loan product options. We think this will lead to additional scale as well as an increase in network density. During fiscal 2024 we achieved significant growth in the amount of lenders that have joined our platform. Based on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) active commercial banking and National Credit Union Administration (“NCUA”) data as of December 31, 2024, approximately 30% of all active FDIC-insured banks and 6.5% of all active NCUA-insured credit unions are on the Janover platform.
Cultivating networks
Looking to the future, we believe cultivating and empowering our networks will be a key to our ability to continue to scale as we execute our business plan. We think network effects will help accelerate our growth as we continue to provide deeper value, and more connections, among the users in our network. Our marketplace currently benefits from what is traditionally described as indirect network effects, as each node on one side of the network joins, the network becomes more valuable for nodes on the other side of the network, so more of them join, making it more valuable for the nodes on the original side. As we aggregate a robust universe of property owners, developers, and investors on one side, and originators and lenders on the other side, the opportunity arises to super-charge those networks by linking nodes within each respective network, as well as adding new products to the marketplace that can serve either side of the marketplace.
Lender Network
We do not currently have a lender network. However, we believe we can leverage aggregated lender demand for loan opportunities and create a robust secondary marketplace for originated loans and loan syndications in which lenders will ultimately be able to transact with each other, creating a network, with a social component, for financial transactions with robust, direct network effects. We believe that there is also an opportunity to create a network to introduce subscriptions to lenders, giving them enhanced access to our data and market.
Borrower Network
We do not currently have a borrower network, but we think this is the biggest long-term opportunity for us. As we build a portal with thousands of property owners, operators, and developers across the country, we believe we can develop and will be able to unlock the ability for owners to “click to list” their property for sale as well as search other properties that are (and are not) for sale and make offers, transact, and obtain financing on our platform, ultimately leading to disintermediation of commercial real estate at a massive scale, eliminating inefficiencies, excess fees, and democratizing the ecosystem. We think that we will be able to embed concierge-level advisory services into these transactions and take a small transaction fee (a fraction of what investment sales professionals charge now) with a more transparent and frictionless transaction.
New marketplace products
This is something we are already tinkering with, but as we scale, we can add new products to our marketplace. Closely related products may be small business loans, PACE financing, and ancillary products could be commercial property insurance, valuation, property management, equity capital, a data marketplace, and more.
We believe that as we scale our marketplace and portal, with thousands of new accounts being set up every month and orders of magnitude more data points, we are going to be able to build AI and machine learning models to create better commercial property underwriting, analytics, and processes for enhanced property valuations, faster originations, more robust distribution, and superior matching outcomes. We aim to simultaneously gather data we can use to become the platform that ultimately disintermediates and digitizes commercial real estate, dethroning incumbent commercial mortgage brokers, disrupting non-competitive lenders, and breaking down the closed ecosystems within the industry by sharing our economies of scale with property owners as well as aligned marketplace product and service providers and leveraging data to improve everyone’s outcome.
Mergers and Acquisitions
We believe we will have the opportunity to build a comprehensive operating system for commercial real estate, as the formerly fractured market adopts technology. As such, we believe we will have the opportunity to acquire companies in adjacent sub-markets into our ecosystem, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of our infrastructure, customer base, and content marketing and allowing our customers access to a best-in-class suite of commercial real estate products from software for data analytics, to technology for buying and selling commercial property. In November 2023, we acquired Groundbreaker, rebranded as Janover Connect in 2024, which is a specialized software as a SaaS platform designed to simplify capital fundraising and investment administration in the commercial real estate industry. By offering an intuitive portal at www.groundbreaker.co, it enables real estate professionals to efficiently manage equity capital, investor relations, and document sharing, fostering a seamless and professional investment experience. The platform also facilitates secure financial transactions and offers robust customer relationship management tools, aiming to enhance transparency and engagement between property developers and investors.
Competition
Our Competitive Disadvantages
We face significant competitive disadvantages due to the proliferation of similarly placed lending platforms, many of which are or may be in a better position to attract more favorable terms from our partners than us. This may place our current and future offerings at a disadvantage and may enable our competitors to offer a superior loan product with improved economics. Many of our current or potential competitors have significantly more resources, such as financial, technical, and marketing resources, than we do and may be able to devote greater resources to the development, promotion, sale and support of their platforms and distribution channels. Our competitors may also have longer operating histories, lower commercial financing costs or costs of capital, more extensive borrower bases, more diversified products and borrower bases, operational efficiencies, more versatile or extensive technology platforms, greater brand recognition and brand loyalty, broader borrower and partner relationships, more extensive and/or more diversified loan funding investor bases than we have, and more extensive product and service offerings than we have.
While we face the risk and challenges of our financing and lending partners developing similarly placed lending platforms of their own, rendering our offerings obsolete, we are currently reliant on a limited set of banks, and non-bank lenders which function and operate in a highly consolidated industry which has been subject to defaults in the past due to severe downturns in the market conditions and larger macro-economic swings and interest rate hikes due to cyclical monetary policies of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and other central banks globally.
We, thus, face competition in areas such as compliance capabilities, commercial financing terms and costs of capital, interest rates and fees (and other financing terms) available to consumers from our lending partners, approval rates, model efficiency, speed and simplicity of loan origination, ease-of-use, marketing expertise, service levels, products and services, technological capabilities and integration, borrower experience, brand and reputation, and terms available to our loan funding investor base.
We believe there are four categories of competitors, and we think they are worthy opponents, but if we are able to execute our business plan, we can win the market and that our competitive advantages give us more than an edge.
Commercial Mortgage Brokers
The primary incumbents are large commercial mortgage broker businesses like Meridian Capital Group, Eastern Union Funding, and debt brokerage divisions of JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, and Marcus & Millichap. Although we do not consider them to be direct threats now as they are generally focused on larger loans and moving down market is difficult, we do believe that they or a similar company could choose to acquire a technology competitor and fund them, or they could choose to incubate a disruptive technology or division. We also think they will be our competition as we scale into intuitional transactions fueled by success in the small balance and middle-market space.
Commercial Mortgage Lenders
Our goal is to empower commercial mortgage lenders by providing a turn-key digital solution for them, and in this capacity, we believe this is more of an opportunity to partner instead of competing. However, lenders like Walker & Dunlop purchased TapCap, and Arbor Realty Trust built “Alex.” We think these initiatives validate our market and we do not consider them direct competitors because we aim to disintermediate commercial real estate finance at scale, and these lenders can only address small segments of the market (in the cases above, these are agency multifamily loans between $1 million and $7 million). We also believe that if they try to compete with us on digital client acquisitions, they will have poor outcomes because they will only be able to convert a very tiny fraction of the large swaths of loan requests, they may be able to generate. Because we have a true marketplace that allows for digital matching, an online loan inquiry is much more valuable to us than it is to a niche lender (like a Fannie Mae multifamily agency lender). Bankers at traditional banks and credit unions can also be considered competitors as they control a large portion of the direct-to-borrower business in the lower-middle and small-balance markets. We aim to move borrowers into our platform and for our service and technology to identify the right banker.
Technology Startups
Several technology start-ups are aiming to use technology to enhance commercial mortgage financing. Two of those competitors are Lev and Stacksource. We believe we are unique due to our organic online presence relative to our competitors, helping us generate significant deal flow and distribution without having to pay third-party vendors or heavily compensated salespeople in a broker-focused business model (which is the primary model and mechanism for sales and lead generation currently employed by most of the competitors we know of to the best of our knowledge). We believe our software to be best-in-class. We provide an optimized user experience with a beautiful user interface and an ability to quickly qualify loan opportunities for borrowers, matching them with the right Capital Markets Advisors, and in turn, the right lenders, in a lower friction process with fewer touchpoints. Further, over a period of time, we aim to aggregate sufficient data to empower us to build upon our matching and sourcing algorithms with machine learning and artificial intelligence. We are currently processing more than two billion dollars in multifamily, commercial real estate, and small business loan financing applications per month, and intend to expand with new features to service both our borrower and lender clients.
Adjacent Technology Companies
Companies including, but not limited to, LendingTree, Upstart, Better, and NerdWallet are mature and maturing technology companies that focus on consumer, residential, and small business finance, are (visa vi small business loans) or, can become competitors. They have robust networks, customer acquisition strategies, balance sheets, and technology know-how that they could leverage to enter the commercial real estate and multifamily finance space. We think this is difficult as they would be moving from high volume/low ticket transactions to low volume/high tech transactions, in what can be a significantly more complex and nuanced transaction. Ultimately, we believe that companies like these (as well as Lenders and Brokers) may want to try to acquire us one day.
Competitive Advantages
Top of funnel
A material part of what we believe to be our competitive advantage is our ability to attract users to our many websites where they can apply for commercial real estate financing (and now small business financing), and through our marketplace be connected to one of our lenders. We refer to these websites as our top of funnel. We believe that we are unique in an industry that is dominated by an “old way” of doing things and that our focus is on delivering value to borrowers first, then to our lenders, with our growth being a by-product of that value. We start by providing transparent education in an opaque market and believe our deeply valuable and well-organized content is a material competitive advantage. Instead of focusing on building one website that covers everything, we have multiple websites focused on educating and empowering commercial property owners, operators, and developers (and now small business owners) in very specific categories, sites such as https://multifamily.loans, which is focused solely on multifamily financing, and https://cmbs.loans, which is focused on commercial mortgage backed securities, or CMBS financing, (a type of commercial mortgage financing involving securitizing pools of commercial property loans). This drill-down allows us to provide the deepest amount of educational value on a specific topic, isolate content marketing risks (i.e., if one of our websites loses its ranking it does not affect our network), risk and build our brand by having it associated with multiple helpful data and information repositories. We have proven this formula by using it to launch nine websites, most of which rank on the first page of Google search results when searching for certain terms related to commercial real estate. We believe we have a repeatable formula that we can use to continue to launch commercial property and business financing websites, covering a range of both targeted and broad topics from commercial mortgages to FHA insured multifamily loans, to continue to grow our presence online. Having such a powerful top-of-funnel demand generation platform is a major factor in our structural cost advantage.
Structural Cost
We believe that as a marketplace that aggregates demand and supply digitally, three primary components that give us a structural cost advantage:
| 1. | We generate demand digitally and do not have to pay huge salaries or commissions to brokers. The incumbent model is for brokers to “elephant hunt” and get paid huge commissions to line up big deals. We do not have to do that. |
| 2. | We transact digitally, and with our platform and powerful matching engine, we are able to make internal individual contributors significantly more productive than they can be in a traditional environment. |
| 3. | We can transact within a wider range of geographies, property types, borrower profiles, and loan amounts than our competitors, meaning we do not have to alienate cohorts of borrowers, allowing us to monetize more of what comes through our platform. |
We believe our structural cost advantage is not just over incumbents but also over tech competitors as well. Most competitors charge borrowers a fixed 1% fee and then rely on an army of high-commission commercial mortgage brokers to find business and earn big commissions. Those brokers are inherently incentivized to do two things: (1) very big loans and (2) close quickly. Those misalignments leave an entire market of loans under $5 million (and even more fractured, loans under $2 million), totally alienated. It also means that a traditional broker’s incentives (to no fault of their own) are to seek the fastest path to closing, and they may push inferior deals just to get something done or choose to transact only with the few lenders they have a relationship with. We cannot transact with a traditional broker because our borrowers find us through a network of education-centric sites and digital marketing. Taking that and our powerful marketplace into account, we operate at software margins, not commercial mortgage banker margins, and we do not have to maintain a balance sheet or share risk as we scale.
Network Effect
We think this cannot be emphasized enough. We benefit from network effects in a traditional two-sided marketplace. Every borrower that joins the platform makes it more attractive for the lenders, so more lenders join, which makes it more attractive to borrowers. This is a truly virtuous cycle as competitive and aligned lenders gain access to new borrowers and loans, they never would have had the opportunity to bid for before, and borrowers gain access to more options and variations of options in an industry that does not have the benefits of homogeneous features of traditional residential home loans.
Data & AI
As borrowers and lenders join our platform and engage, we are accumulating a first-party data set and interpretations that give us what we believe is a competitive advantage that we can use to optimize conversions, matching algorithms, borrower experiences, and more. We believe in the future, we will be able to leverage AI to provide predictive data on market trends, valuations, enhanced underwriting, and more.
Intellectual Property
Our rights in our intellectual property, including trademarks, patents, trade secrets, copyrights and domain names, as well as contractual provisions and restrictions on use of our intellectual property, are important to our business. For example, our trademark rights assist in our marketing efforts to develop brand recognition and differentiate our brand from our competitors. We own a number of trademark registrations and applications in the U.S. and in foreign jurisdictions. These trademarks include, among others, “Janover Ventures.” We will pursue additional trademark registrations to the extent we believe it will be beneficial. We also have registered domain names for websites that we use in our business. We may be subject to third-party claims from time to time with respect to our intellectual property.
Additionally, we rely upon unpatented trade secrets and confidential know-how and continuing technological innovation to develop and maintain our competitive position. We also enter into confidentiality and intellectual property rights agreements with our employees, consultants, contractors and business partners. Under such agreements, our employees, consultants and contractors are subject to invention assignment provisions designed to protect our proprietary information and ensure our ownership of intellectual property developed pursuant to such agreements.
For additional information about our intellectual property and associated risks, see the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related To Our Intellectual Property And Platform Development.”
Governmental/Regulatory Approval and Compliance
To the knowledge of the Company, the Company is not required to obtain any government or agency approvals for its current or planned operations. However, the Company, its operations, results of operations and financial condition could be adversely affected by new laws or regulations or by changes in existing laws or regulations, or the application thereof. If we fail to comply with laws and regulations applicable to the U.S., or make incorrect determinations in complex tax regimes, we may incur significant financial penalties.
Seasonality
The commercial real estate market tends to be seasonal in nature, with the first and fourth fiscal quarters being more active than the second and third fiscal quarters. Such fluctuations have to be considered by investors since quarterly results may not be indicative of the Company’s fiscal year results.
Employees
As of the date of this filing, we had 26 employees, of which 14 were full-time employees, including Blake Janover, our Chief Executive Officer and Chairman. We also engage independent contractors to provide services to the Company, on an as-needed basis.
The text of this filing, as the company filed it with the SEC, without its images or exhibits. This is not investment advice.