Lev Lands $170M in New Funding

Lev’s latest round brings its total funding to more than $200 million. Some $100 million of that came via debt financing from Cross River’s strategic direct lending group, according to a release.

“Since our start in 2019, Lev has grown 10x year-over-year thanks to our proprietary approach to CRE financing,” said Yaakov Zar, CEO and co-founder of Lev. “We’ve built the only digital CRE financing experience and combined that with the best team and network in the industry. It’s been an incredible effort with some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with, and I’m so excited for what’s next.”

Lev nabbed Shami Waissmann from L&L Holding in 2021 as its director of lending strategies and Wayne Potters from Société Générale at the start of this year to launch the new commercial mortgage-backed securities platform. 

“Having witnessed the increasing digitization of the residential mortgage process over the past few years, we believe that commercial lending will undergo a similar evolution,” said Nate Levin, managing director at Parker89. “Yaakov and the Lev team are leading this charge, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with them as they continue to reinvent the process.”

“Yaakov and his team have introduced technology to disrupt the last bastion of traditional lending that is resisting the wave of innovation,” said Gilles Gade, founder, president and CEO of Cross River. “We’ve worked closely with Lev since our initial investment and are confident they will continue to revolutionize the CREF value chain and the way borrowers and lenders interact.”

“Following our Series B raise, the next six months will be focused on increasing our investments in process automation and experience technologies,” Zar added. 

Update: This story originally misattributed source material. This has been corrected. We apologize for the error.

Emily Fu can be reached at efu@commercialobserver.com.