Why we started June Point Lending

William DeVar and I have known each other for more than 15 years. We had talked for a while about starting a company together, but we didn’t know exactly what it would be.

Starting a company is hard in a way that’s difficult to explain until you’ve done it. The environment shifts constantly, almost nothing is certain, and you make many decisions based on incomplete information. What helps a lot is having a co-founder to build it with you. William and I had already been through it together once, having helped build Better.com from its earliest days, and came out of that with a strong mutual respect and friendship. When we decided to do it again, there wasn’t much to figure out about the partnership. That kind of certainty about a co-founder is rare.

I spent the stretch before June Point Lending as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Deciens, a fintech-focused venture firm that would later back the company. That made the setup a little unusual. We knew who we wanted to work with and who we wanted to back us before we knew what the business would be. The idea for the actual business came last.

The conversations that changed everything

Given our backgrounds in mortgage, most of the ideas we kicked around focused on traditional home financing. Before we landed on DSCR loans, we had a different idea. We spent time taking that different idea to real estate agents, loan officers, and financial advisors to get their reactions. What kept happening is that people were polite about it and then changed the subject. “Yeah, that’s cool, but here’s my actual problem.” As it turned out, the “problem” was almost always a specific borrower they couldn’t qualify. A small business owner. A freelancer. Someone whose income did not fit a standard W-2 framework. We heard about the problem enough times that we eventually realized it was the actual problem to solve.

That energized us. A lot of people who succeed in non-traditional ways, like contractors, small business owners, and others who’ve built something of their own, can be very creditworthy. They just have to work harder than a W-2 employee to prove it to a lender. Many of them also invest in rental property, and the same documentation problem follows them into every purchase. Their credit was rarely the issue. They didn’t fit the traditional box.

What made it more compelling is that the products those borrowers needed already existed. A DSCR loan, for example, qualifies an investment property on its rental income, so the borrower’s personal income stays out of the decision. But many lenders and loan officers had written off non-QM as too complicated and too expensive to offer, partly because so much of the underwriting is still done by hand. Brokers already work with these borrowers, so we built June Point Lending as a wholesale lender and are developing technology to take as much of that manual work out as we can.

The timing is right

We think we’re bringing this idea to the market at the right time. Non-QM originations reached $239 billion in 2025, roughly 10% of the U.S. mortgage market by dollar volume, according to Polygon Research’s 2025 market analysis. Institutional capital markets also have a real appetite for these assets. The investor and DSCR segments, in particular, have been expanding, with Optimal Blue’s August 2026 data showing that DSCR loans accounted for more than 35% of non-QM production and were growing year over year.

The constraint was on the supply side: too few lenders made non-QM easy for loan officers to offer. We set out to change that.

About the name

Naming a company is hard. We capitalized the business in June of last year, and we liked the idea of June: It’s the start of summer, graduation season, a time for family vacations, and the busiest time of the year for buying a house and moving. It feels like a hopeful month: a month of new beginnings, promise, and excitement.

That seemed like a good thing to be named after. The domain was available too.

Who is behind this

A lender that is a year old asking a broker to trust it with a file is asking a lot. We knew that, so we spent the months leading up to our first loan establishing credibility as a counterparty. We capitalized the business with institutional backing and assembled a team that had done this before. William and I were both at Better.com during the company’s early days. I worked on capital markets there, and William worked on product and operations before going on to serve as chief product officer at Koalafi. Along with many other talented people, we helped build Better.com from an idea into a lender processing billions of dollars in funded volume each month.

The team we’ve assembled at June Point Lending has extensive experience in mortgage. Mike D’Ambrosio, who has been with us since the beginning, spent decades in underwriting, credit risk and policy, and worked with us at Better.com. He also brings the kind of credit discipline that might sink young lenders. Dan Goldman joined us early as well. Having decades of experience in mortgage sales, operations, and leadership, he is the person in the room who has already navigated most of the situations we’re encountering as we build June Point Lending. That experience matters when you’re moving fast.

June Point Lending started with four people; we’re close to 20 now. While we’re still a young, small company focused on doing our best for the brokers and their teams who are taking a chance on us, we’re learning and improving every day so we can earn and re-earn brokers’ trust with every transaction.

Viral Shah is co-founder and CEO of June Point Lending, a tech-forward wholesale lender specializing in non-QM loans. Founded by mortgage industry veterans and backed by institutional capital, June Point Lending is currently offering debt service coverage ratio (DSCR) loans (business purpose loans) in 19 states.