Most banks won't touch a house flipper. The loans are short, risky and a pain to approve.
Figure just paid big for a company that does almost nothing else. And it wants to run those loans through a blockchain.
Kiavi started back in 2013. It grew into a giant in a part of lending most people never see.
It makes fix-and-flip loans. That's the short-term money house flippers use to buy a home, fix it up and sell it.
Last year Kiavi made a record $7.8 billion in those loans. The $717 million deal is about a tenth of what it lends out in a single year.
Kiavi began life as a startup called LendingHome. Since then it has made more than $30 billion in loans.
Last year was its best yet. It pulled in over $250 million in sales and turned a real profit, which is rare for a young lender.
Banks tend to skip this market. The loans move fast, and the risk is hard to price.
That gap is the exact opening Figure wants.
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Figure runs its lending on the blockchain. That's a digital record it uses to bundle and sell loans fast.
The old way was slow and full of paper. Buying Kiavi hands Figure a huge new market to run through its system.
That market is worth about $200 billion a year. Figure plans to push all of it onto its own rails.
Kiavi also leans on smart software to size up each loan. That helps it move fast without taking on wild risk.
Think of it like swapping a filing cabinet for a search bar.
The loans are the same. The speed of moving them is not.
Figure isn't doing this alone. It's forming a joint venture, or shared business, with Sixth Street.
The two will split the loans already on Kiavi's books. Sixth Street is a big investment firm, and the pair have worked together before.
They teamed up in early 2025 to push $2 billion into home loans that sit outside government backing. Kiavi's boss, Arvind Mohan, will join Figure once the deal closes.
For investors, the read is simple. Money is flowing toward the lending banks walked away from.
And firms are racing to own the pipes.
Figure even runs its own digital dollar, a kind of stablecoin. But this deal is a plain buyout, not a crypto trade.
Fix-and-flip lending lives and dies with the housing market. When prices rise and remodels pay off, the loans print money.
When prices stall, missed payments pile up fast. Building costs can spike too, which only makes that worse.
This deal works until the next housing slump puts it to the test.
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