Real estate title firm Doma, backed by Lennar, to go public in deal with SPAC
Doma, a firm that looks to disrupt the real estate title insurance market, has agreed to combine with Capitol Investment Corp. V, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company.
Doma, formerly known as States Title, has a less than 1% share of the title market in the U.S. but projects to be at 5% by 2023.
The company is backed in part by Lennar, one of the nation's biggest homebuilders.
"I founded Doma to remove friction and frustration from home-buying and to make closing on a home as simple and efficient as booking a ride or ordering a meal," said Max Simkoff, founder and CEO of Doma.
"Right now, our patented machine intelligence technology reduces title processing time from five days to as little as one minute — our goal is that the entire mortgage closing process move from a 50+ day ordeal to less than a week."
Founded in 2016, Doma uses machine intelligence to replace large portions of the antiquated residential real estate closing process with instant technology solutions, according to a press release. It accelerates title and closing timelines while also greatly benefiting lenders, real estate professionals and title agents with significant time and cost savings.
This merger will take the company's value from $623 million at their C funding round last March to $3 billion. It will also expand beyond title to additional aspects of the closing process such as home warranty and appraisals.
To date, Doma has facilitated over 800,000 real estate closings for lenders such as Chase, Homepoint, PennyMac, Sierra Pacific Mortgage and others.
The transaction is expected to provide up to $645 million in cash proceeds, including a fully committed $300 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, and up to $345 million of cash held in the trust account of Capitol, according to a release.
Top-tier investors anchoring the PIPE overall include funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, The Gores Group, Hedosophia, SB Management, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp., and Wells Capital.
Lennar has also committed to the PIPE, and Spencer Rascoff, co-founder and former CEO of Zillow Group, has committed a personal investment to the PIPE.