Figure, with its debut as the "first RWA stock," has spent $717 million less than a year after going public. The target of this investment is not some cryptocurrency new rich, but a well-established lending institution that has been involved in renovating home loans for 13 years.

Written by: Sanqing, Foresight News

On June 10, blockchain-native capital market company Figure Technology Solutions (Nasdaq: FIGR) announced the acquisition of Kiavi for $717 million, a non-bank residential real estate investment loan platform established in 2013 that has funded over $30 billion in loans.

In this transaction, Figure acquired Kiavi's technology and operations platform by issuing approximately $600 million in senior unsecured notes, providing around $538 million; the remaining approximately $179 million was funded by global alternative asset management company Sixth Street, forming a joint venture to buy out the existing loans on Kiavi's balance sheet. Sixth Street also provides a $3 billion forward purchase commitment. The two companies had already been long-term partners. Kiavi's current CEO Arvind Mohan will join Figure as Chief Business Officer after the closing of the deal, leading business integration.

Source of the image: Figure's tweet

After the announcement, FIGR's stock price opened high, briefly reaching $30.11 during the trading session, but subsequently retreated, closing at $28.07, a slight drop of 0.74%, with an intraday fluctuation of about 9%.

Kiavi

Kiavi's predecessor was LendingHome, founded in San Francisco in 2013 by Matt Humphrey and James Herbert, backed by investors such as Foundation Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Renren.

It primarily offers two types of products: short-term transition loans (Residential Transition Loan, RTL) for real estate renovation investors and debt service coverage ratio loans (DSCR) for long-term rental properties.

The brand was renamed Kiavi in 2021, becoming the first privately-held non-bank institution in the U.S. to reach 100,000 loans by June 2025.

According to the official announcement, Kiavi expects to achieve revenue exceeding $250 million and EBITDA exceeding $100 million in 2025, both setting historical records; the total loan volume for the year is approximately $7.8 billion, up about 20% from around $6.5 billion in 2024.

First Lien

Figure's beginnings date back to the end of 2017. Mike Cagney, co-founder of SoFi, turned his attention to blockchain after leaving SoFi that year. In 2018, he founded Figure in San Francisco with his wife, June Ou, and launched the first product on the self-built Provenance Blockchain the following year, a home equity line of credit (HELOC) initiated on-chain.

Mike Cagney | Source of the image: Bloomberg

Since then, the company has expanded along the same logic—initiating loans, financing liquidity, secondary market transactions...and has gradually moved these onto the blockchain, building consumer loan market Figure Connect and on-chain warehouse financing market Democratized Prime.

After going public on Nasdaq in September 2025, Figure officially stated that it currently holds about 75% of the total global RWA tokenization.

The problem is that HELOCs are second lien loans.

Second liens rank lower in the payment order when a borrower defaults, carry higher risks, and have a smaller amount of assets that can be supported. Figure estimates that the first lien market is approximately 25 times the size of the second lien market.

Both Kiavi's RTL and DSCR belong to the first lien, falling into the non-qualified mortgage (Non-QM) sector that traditional banks have long avoided due to regulatory concerns—demand is strong, but supply remains highly fragmented.

Figure is proactively shifting its focus to asset types.

After the acquisition is completed, Figure expects to add more than $7 billion in first lien loans annually. According to CEO Michael Tannenbaum, the proportion of Figure’s first lien business has increased from 10% to 20% in 2025, with the company expecting this ratio to reach about 40% by the end of 2027.

AI

Both Figure and Kiavi excel at using AI to handle non-standard data that traditional financial institutions are reluctant to engage with, establishing barriers in segments where manual processes cannot be scaled.

Kiavi's core technological asset is a proprietary "Post-Renovation Property Value Estimation Engine" and an automated document review system. An old property awaiting renovation is nearly impossible to quantify risk in the eyes of traditional institutions.

Kiavi's model can predict the market value after renovation based on historical transaction data and renovation plans, allowing for scaled credit decision-making for loans like RTL.

This capability brings significant market advantages. According to the Scotsman Guide 2025 Top Private Lenders ranking (with underlying data from Forecasa), Kiavi's fix-and-flip loan volume is approximately $5.5 billion in 2024, more than three times that of the second place, and it is expected to continue to expand its lead in 2025.

Source of the image: Kiavi

What Figure needs to address is the issue after the assets leave Kiavi: how to get them on-chain, how to circulate them, and how to attract institutional capital. A newly revealed product from Figure called Adaptor is designed for this purpose.

It supports "Agent to Agent" automated access, unifying the varying data formats of different initiating institutions, thereby compressing the access cycle for new partners.

Kiavi's assets will become the first actual validation scenario once Adaptor goes live. According to Figure's investor presentation materials, the company expects this transaction to achieve approximately $35 million in cost synergies within 24 months.

The two sets of AI are stitched together, both aimed at the same goal: to make non-standard property loans on-chain become priceable, transferable, and scalable.

Integration

Figure adopts a dual-class share structure; according to the IPO prospectus, Cagney and his affiliates hold Class B shares, controlling about 69% of total voting power at the time of the IPO; as of the latest proxy statement in April 2026, he still controls the majority voting power in the company, and Figure continues to be recognized by Nasdaq as a "controlled company."

As a growth-stage company that promotes large-scale M&A less than a year after its IPO, Figure disclosed in the S-1 filing that there were previously existing significant internal control deficiencies that need to be rectified, and the large integration tests the execution team will face cannot be underestimated.

On Kiavi's side, its assets are sensitive to the interest rate cycle. During the rate hike cycle of 2022, due to the lack of backing from government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Kiavi's asset liquidity in the capital markets tightened, and the company also made corresponding cost and personnel adjustments.

This vulnerability has already been validated in a high-interest-rate stage, and future interest rate changes will still be an important external variable for RTL/DSCR initiation volume.

Furthermore, the vast majority of Figure's existing assets are still focused on HELOCs. Kiavi's asset types, data formats, and customer bases differ significantly from this. Whether Adaptor can truly reduce integration costs and whether Kiavi's non-standard assets can smoothly be absorbed by institutional investors in Democratized Prime remains in doubt.

The good news is that Figure claims the transaction will enhance earnings per share, with a non-leveraged cash payback period of no more than four years, and reiterates a mid-term EBITDA margin target of about 60%; Kiavi’s monthly loan volume of over $100 million will directly flow into Democratized Prime.

Sixth Street's over $130 billion in managed and committed capital, as well as the $3 billion forward purchase commitment it provides, offer a considerable capital buffer for the joint venture; Mohan joining the executive team means Kiavi's customer relationships and industry resources are retained within Figure's management structure.

The story of RWA has been told for several years now. With $717 million, Figure is migrating an institution that has operated for 13 years and processes tens of billions of dollars in real loans entirely onto the blockchain. This is one of the most structurally significant acquisitions to date in the field of RWA tokenization.

The potential market space that Figure is targeting is estimated to offer approximately $200 billion annually in RTL/DSCR initiation opportunities, backed by the long-term renovation and rental demand generated by about $25 trillion worth of aging housing stock in the U.S.

If the integration goes smoothly, it will be a landmark node for the blockchain capital market moving from "proof of concept" to "scale operation." Not only for Figure but for the entire RWA credit asset market.