DFW-Based 'Data Warehouse for Lenders' Gestalt Tech Raises $5.9M Seed Round

Flower Mound-based Gestalt Tech, a unified data ecosystem that accelerates insights and AI adoption for lenders, has announced a $5.9 million seed round led by Alpha Edison and Yamaha Motor Ventures, with participation from others including Alloy Labs, Newtype Ventures, Sentiero, Long Run Capital.

“We’re excited that so many investors saw our vision of a unified data ecosystem for the lending industry,” Gestalt Tech Co-Founder and CEO Stephanie Hanson said in a statement of the “over-subscribed” seed round. “While we would have liked to have taken the entire amount that was committed, ultimately, we felt $5.9 million was the right number to ensure the best build and support structure for our customers.”

Hanson said the seed round brings total investments in Gestalt to $8 million. With the additional capital, the company said it will be able to continue building out its solution, including bringing more components of its unified data ecosystem to market faster.

Hanson is also the co-founder of defi SOLUTIONS, one of the first configurable loan originations systems. Hanson co-founded Gestalt with @Ensemblex, a venture studio founded by fintech veterans and focused on the future of financing.

That main component, the universal lending data foundation—aka “data warehouse”—launched in 2023 and continues to win customers from a variety of lending segments, the company said.

“The Ensemblex team has been applying AI to credit underwriting for over a decade—first at our own fintech and now for our fintech and bank clients globally,” Shawn Budde, co-founder of Ensemblex, said in a statement. “Most organizations have messy, unreliable data. We co-founded Gestalt with Stephanie to solve that problem. Additionally, over the last year, Gestalt has assembled a world-class team to create what will soon be an industry standard.”

Solving the problem of disorganized data

Gestalt said the problem it solves is “disorganized data.”

The company said that organized data powers everything lenders need to stay competitive: monitoring operational KPIs, securing external capital, and staying compliant with state and federal regulators. All lenders need to quickly access their data, the company noted.

The challenge is that their data is scattered among different systems and in different formats that require data scientists and analysts to spend more than half their time wrangling the data before lenders can even begin to extract insights from it. Organized data is also critically important for lenders who want to leverage AI to stay competitive, Gestalt said.

Gestalt estimates that lenders are spending $130 billion a year on AI and other tools.

With Gestalt’s data warehouse, lenders can centralize and organize all of their data from all of their systems in one easily accessible location and in a much more efficient and comprehensive way than legacy methods, the company said. Traditionally, lenders only had two choices to organize internal data, the company noted—take on the intimidating task in-house or hire consultants. Both choices have proven time and money intensive, while Gestalt’s data warehouse delivers insights to lenders six times faster and five times cheaper by offering an out-of-the-box solution and eliminating tons of manual, non-value-add work, the company said.

Gestalt said its data warehouse features a patent-pending, AI-powered, smart mapper that automatically suggests how data should be mapped into the data warehouse, leaving the user to simply review and approve—with users also benefitting from Gestalt’s anomaly detector and pipeline maintainer.

Other key components currently in development that will make up Gestalt’s unified data ecosystem include compliance data tape to accelerate audits and foster relationships with regulators and a vendor ecosystem for one-click trials of new products that accelerate the sales cycle and get to value-add faster.

Gestalt Tech said that data pulls that used to take months and more than 200+ man-hours now take less than one day.

Investors weigh in

Investors said they see many benefits in Gestalt’s industry-leading offerings.

Robey Miller, partner at Alpha Edison, said his firm is “thrilled to be part of Gestalt’s journey and believe they are poised to redefine standards in data utilization and operational efficiency within the lending industry. Stephanie exhibits many of the traits that we look for in founders. She combines a deep understanding of the problem area with unique insight and vision and a proven ability to execute.”

Dan Barth, principal at Yamaha Motor Ventures, said he thinks Gestalt is at the forefront of automating how lenders fully leverage their data.

“Their team of industry veterans has demonstrated exceptional collaboration with both customers and the broader lending ecosystem,” Barth said. “By leveraging their AI-powered data infrastructure, Gestalt offers a unified, real-time view of data, streamlining processes and delivering significant savings in time and costs for financial institutions. This oversubscribed capital raise will enable Gestalt to accelerate customer growth and drive strategic product development. We’re excited to partner with them as they embark on this growth journey.”