Investing in June Point Lending
The startup modernizing the non-QM mortgage market.
The U.S. mortgage market has evolved dramatically since the financial crisis, but one segment has remained stubbornly analog. Non-Qualified Mortgages, or Non-QM, serve a large population of creditworthy borrowers whose financial profiles don’t fit neatly into agency underwriting frameworks, leaving much of the category dependent on manual processes and fragmented infrastructure.
June Point Lending (“JPL”) was founded to change that. In just eight months, the company has gone from initial funding to a live mortgage lender — a notable pace for any startup, particularly in one of the most complex corners of finance. JPL emerged from our partnership with Entrepreneur in Residence Viral Shah, who previously co-founded Better.com, and is bringing true digitization and institutional scale to a massive, yet underserved slice of the housing market.
The Gap June Point Lending Fills
Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the mortgage market was about equally split between agency mortgages — those mortgages that Fannie and Freddie could insure — and non-agency mortgages. However, the problematic subprime mortgages that led to the crisis made up a significant portion of the non-agency market. After the crisis, the non-agency market collapsed completely.
Since then, the non-agency market has been reborn and has been on a secular growth path ever since, still only representing ~17% of total mortgage originations, leaving ample room to grow. This market, though, is very different from the pre-Global Financial Crisis non-agency market, as it is largely a prime market.
Within non-agency, the fastest growing segment is Non-QM mortgages, accounting for $232B in annual originations in 2025, up from $182B in 2024. These are mortgages to credit-worthy borrowers where either the mortgage is underwritten using a methodology outside of agency guidelines or the mortgage has features that can’t be incorporated into agency mortgages. For example:
Bank statement mortgages — for borrowers without a W-2: These are underwritten based on the borrower’s cash flow, as determined by their bank statements. Borrowers in this category include small business owners who pay themselves via dividends, professionals like lawyers or fund managers who are paid via partnership income, and homebuyers who have significant income-generating assets but no W-2.
DSCR (Debt Service Coverage Ratio) mortgages — for borrowers buying rental properties: With most mortgage products, real estate investors can’t exclusively use the property's rental income in the mortgage qualification process — they need to qualify with their total individual income for each property they own, as well as all their other non-real estate income and liabilities. DSCR mortgages focus solely on the expected income from the properties as a cash flow to cover the mortgage.
While the agency mortgage market has seen meaningful digitization over the past decade, Non-QM underwriting across the industry is still largely manual. Underwriters for bank statement mortgages, for example, typically read bank statements line by line, a slow and opaque process that’s frustrating for brokers and borrowers alike.
Meanwhile, institutional capital markets have significant appetite for these assets, as (i) they are materially higher yielding than agency mortgages, (ii) they now have a 10-year default history, which is very positive, and (iii) they are long duration — a unique combination. Buyers have an appetite to purchase billions of dollars per month, but can’t find the volume. Demand is not the constraint. What the market lacks are originators capable of originating these mortgages at scale with institutional-grade capability.
JPL’s Approach
JPL approaches this as an infrastructure problem rather than simply a lending business.
On the origination side, JPL is automating the complex credit review process that competitors still handle manually, working to replace weeks-long review cycles with speed and certainty for brokers and borrowers.
On the capital side, most new lenders spend years fighting to get partnerships with institutional capital partners and favorable financing terms, if they ever can. Institutional buyers typically want to see multiple years of originations history and balance sheets in the tens of millions of dollars. However, JPL secured warehouse lines and tier-1 capital markets buyers from day one, with economics typically only available to the largest originators. This means the company can scale capital-efficiently instead of having to burn equity to fund negative unit economics.
And on distribution, the team is doing what they consider the most valuable work of all: sitting with loan officers to understand their pain points and building a submission experience that solves real problems for their partners, ultimately helping more people buy homes.
Who’s Behind It
As co-founder and CEO, Viral Shah is building on his track record from co-founding Better.com, where he helped scale the company to over $30B in originations, bringing genuine digitization to the standard mortgage market. We were introduced to Viral in 2022, and after he joined Deciens as an Entrepreneur in Residence, we saw firsthand the combination of rigor, ambition, and operating experience required to build in this category — particularly in a more complex market environment.
He's joined by co-founder William DeVar, a Better.com colleague who was part of the founding team and led product and operations through the company’s early years before serving as Chief Product Officer at Koalafi, a Series C consumer lending startup.
Having previously built to scale in the industry, they are uniquely equipped to build JPL into a true institutional-grade player.
The Road Ahead
The hardest part of building a startup isn't the product — it's getting the first customer. Funding their first loans this year validated the core thesis. With strong market feedback and ambitious goals in 2026, we're excited to see JPL continue to execute and scale.
