Good afternoon —
The notary part of the mortgage process — long an offline backwater — has come into its own over the last 12 months, jump-started by COVID shutdowns, of course. The latest example is the announcement today that Notarize raised $130 million in a Series D round.
Compare that to last March, when the company raised $35 million, which I thought was noteworthy enough at the time. Notarize has now raised a total of $213 million, which the company said it will funnel into its digital notarization and identity verification technology, plus double its staff over the next year.
"There are decades when nothing happens, and then there are years when decades happen," Notarize CEO Pat Kinsel said.
Kinsel knows what he's talking about. UETA was approved in 1999 and the ESIGN Act was passed in 2000, but even as recently as 2017, the idea of a remote notarization was something to behold, as this HousingWire article describes:
"E-mortgages were a hot topic at December's Digital Mortgage Conference in San Francisco, and attendees watched a live demonstration of documents signed electronically before a notary signing agent who was 3,000 miles away."
Imagine drawing a crowd for this in 2017! That's the same year scientists teleported a photon from Earth to a satellite in orbit and created time crystals, "a previously hypothetical crystal that can potentially stay in perpetual motion without energy, thanks to a fracture in time's symmetry." But no matter — we in mortgage watched someone use the internet to sign something!
It's been a long, slow slog, but here we are, and in 2020 the adoption of remote online notarization jumped 547% according to an ALTA survey. And with cash infusions like the one Notarize just got, who knows where we'll go next.
Until tomorrow —
Sarah Wheeler
HousingWire Editor in Chief
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