Could the Montreal-based fintech’s $302m Series E signal a new phase for Canada's mortgage technology sector?
Digital mortgage brokerage Nesto has emerged as a serious player in the Canadian mortgage game since its foundation eight years ago – and its rise is showing no sign of slowing, with the company last week announcing a $302 million Series E financing round to spur the next AI-fuelled stage of its growth.
The Montreal-based firm is no scrappy upstart: that financing round gave it a valuation of $1.47 billion and included huge institutional names in Canadian finance including La Caisse (formerly CDPQ), Fidelity Investments Canada, PICTON Investments, and Endeavor Catalyst.
And its progress to date is one of the strongest indications yet of the transformative influence technology and artificial intelligence are exerting on Canada’s mortgage sector – not just in recent years, but looking ahead to the industry’s next era.
Central to Nesto’s value proposition – and attractiveness for investors – is its proprietary technology platform, one that it’s been building for years. A fully integrated, end-to-end mortgage origination, underwriting and servicing platform, it allows the company to leverage clean data to launch and develop AI agents.
That’s significant for the industry because the company says it has the potential to turbocharge the underwriting process, potentially reducing time devoted to decision-making through its in-house platform Maestro AI.
“We decided to focus on what is probably the hardest problem to solve first, which is underwriting,” Malik Yacoubi (pictured top), Nesto chief executive officer, told Canadian Mortgage Professional, “making sure that we’re able to accelerate and get more accuracy on the decisioning and data validation and so on by using our AI solution.”
Underwriting remains a key priority for mortgage brokers
It remains to be seen how dramatically the process will be transformed – and whether the advent of new technologies opens the door to a wider industry revolution on underwriting efficiency.
Brokers, though, have long flagged the importance borrowers attach to a swift underwriting journey. CMP’s 2025 Brokers on Lenders survey revealed that lenders offering faster portals and cleaner workflows won more volume as brokers gravitated to smoother systems, while turnaround time, underwriter access, and adaptable credit policies were also crucial differentiators.
Yacoubi emphasized that human oversight remains central – and will continue to be even as the underwriting process evolves.
“Every task is fully auditable, traceable,” he said. “There’s a human in the loop that can verify all these different decisions with the different interfaces that we develop – which ultimately creates a superpower to our underwriting team going forward.”
‘Building the mortgage ecosystem of the future’
Nesto became a direct lender in 2022, strengthening its position in that sector with a blockbuster acquisition of CMLS Group in 2024. A press release announcing its new funding round stated that the volume of mortgages under administration held by the company has swelled to over $80 billion, with originations to date in 2026 totalling $37 billion.
For now, Yacoubi describes the company’s mission as “to build the mortgage ecosystem of the future for the Canadian market,” although he also hinted at expansion into other lending sectors.
“We’re also thinking to expand a bit beyond mortgages and be able to service lending more broadly in the Canadian ecosystem,” he said. “And we’ll be doing so by continuing to push the commercialization of our SaaS and AI solution that we’re commercializing to other financial institutions.
“As we continue to push that white label solution to other financial institutions, we believe that we should see more and more of Canadian transaction volume flow through our ecosystem.”
The size of its latest financing round – and the prominence of the institutions involved with the funding – suggest external parties are increasingly interested in pushing the mortgage process forward.
“It’s a good testament of what we’ve achieved and the trust that we gain from existing and new investors,” Yacoubi said. “It gives us a bit more fuel to continue to accelerate our growth going forward.”
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