It was hard not to notice Aidium’s presence at ICE Experience ‘25. Nine employees attended the January event at an estimated cost of $75,000 & staffers treated themselves to expensive dinners on the 🎲 Strip.

Meanwhile, employees’ 401K accounts were getting shorted & the company’s enterprise sales strategy was foundering. Marketing contractors weren’t being paid, nor were their lenders. The landlord would soon evict Aidium from its Denver office.

The company’s president, Dan Bos, resigned in May. In July, a creditor named Pinnacle Business Funding informed one of Aidium’s former lender clients that there was a lien on Aidium for nonpayment totaling $119K, according to a review of documents by The Mortgage Scoop. That’s right around when investor PeakSpan Capital, which led the $19M Series A round in April ‘24, stepped in. CEO Spencer Dusebout was demoted to Chief Product Officer & nearly all the sales leaders moved on. Severance wasn’t offered to laid off employees, per several sources.

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The abrupt layoffs were particularly frustrating for those who had watched Dusebout & others just a few weeks earlier take a trip to Spain 🇪🇸 for a product powwow w/ the Europe-based tech team. “We just had to laugh,” said a former employee. “Like, this has to be a joke, right?”

“It is just incredibly poor, incredibly insensitive,” said a different ex-staffer. 

The Scoop spoke to about a dozen sources for this story. Several said they felt Aidium was marred by a spendthrift culture & a tendency to make promises it didn’t deliver on. For example, CrossCountry Mortgage was in late-stage talks w/ Aidium but pulled out b/c the product team—led by Dusebout—never delivered the 3 integrations needed to consummate the deal, sources said.

Another ex-employee said he thought Dusebout was in over his head. “It felt like a smash-and-grab was his approach to this business,” he said. “Let's get as many users as possible, let's just get as many logos as we can & then try to flip this thing, exit ASAP b/c the underlying product wasn't as strong as it could have been.”

Despite allegations of financial mismanagement, PeakSpan has kept Dusebout on the payroll. They have since injected new capital into the company & believe that Aidium can still build a great business in the hardscrabble mortgage CRM space, which is dominated by Total Expert. 

In an interview, new CEO Josh Glantz acknowledged that such missteps were the catalyst for PeakSpan’s summer intervention. Aidium is putting in an entirely new sales team & has pivoted away from the prior enterprise sales model strategy. 

“Doing that when banks & mortgage brokerages weren’t making significant investments was probably just challenging timing as opposed to challenging go-to-market motion,” said Glantz, a vertical SaaS veteran w/ CRM building experience. The new focus, he added, is on middle-market & teams & branches that are able to make their own decisions on tech.

One top sales manager said Aidium offers a great CRM. “It’s out-of-the-box, plug-and-play, ready to go,” he said. “When you talk to individual originators, Aidium and Go High Level are probably the two easiest. You can grip it & rip it.”

It’s unclear what Aidium’s revamped cap table looks like. Glantz declined to say how much was raised in the most recent round, apart from noting that it was “more than adequate” to support growth & capture market share.

“It is not our intent to do anything that takes advantage of vendors,” Glantz said. “We’re committed to this industry & we want to make sure that we're looked at as a credible organization, with credible team members & financial controls.”

Still, several past employees said Aidium has a lot of reputation-management work ahead.

“I think they misunderstand how tight the vertical is — everybody knows everybody,” one ex-employee said.

Mortgage tech firm WILQO (no relation to Jeff Tweedy) has acquired NJ-based tech firm Brimma for an undisclosed price, sources told The Scoop. This is a major development for WILQO. Brimma's Vallia AI DocFlow system uses AI to automatically receive, classify and validate loan documents.

“The only way to truly control document ingestion, classification, extraction & then workflow from the extraction, is to buy a company that does that extremely well,” said a WILQO source familiar w/ the acquisition. “Their accuracy rate & the quantity of data that they successfully extract is 10 to 100 X better than others.”

The company is led by Supree Periasamy, an Ellie Mae alum.

More to come tomorrow on the acquisition.

One top sales manager is frustrated w/ some of the LinkedIn chatter. He refreshes his feed only to find commentary that non-producing sales managers like himself are stealing a living, costing their LOs money. 

“This notion that a manager who doesn't produce is somehow a waste of space, a P&L drag, absolutely baffles me,” he said. “The manager who produces, but also has 6 LOs under him or her — are those LOs getting a better deal on their rate sheet b/c their manager also produces? The answer would be, no, they're not. What they are getting is a manager who splits up his or her time because their personal production is always going to take precedent.”

Agree? Disagree? Let us know. 🖋

The parent company of Better Mortgage said Monday that it’s secured an agreement to originate mortgages for one of the top 5 U.S. personal financial services platforms. It didn’t ID the company but said it has more than 50M customers. Also, the mortgage lender touted a new partnership with a “top 5 nonbank mortgage originator” involving HELOCs. They’ll be increasing warehouse funding w/ a new stock offering worth up to $75M. If they can hit that target, they’ll have enough on the lines to increase originations to $2B/month.

Meanwhile, Better’s stock continues to soar. It jumped from Friday’s low of $52.38 to $58.63 as of press time.

I received a lot of feedback about Friday’s edition re whether firms can snag market share from ICE’s Encompass. “I sell the Mortgage Cadence LOS & I can 100% confirm what James Kleimann says about the near-impossible task of ripping out Encompass to replace with another LOS,” said George Morales. “I’ve heard it over and over ‘…Your platform is better, modern, etc but convincing the executive team/board to take the org through replacing Encompass is something we tried and failed to accomplish several times…too painful.’”

Industry veteran Mike Cush said Vesta will “continue to grow because it is rules based and easy to amend in a time when AI innovations in other parts of the business will make the ability to change without engaging an army of consultants or the mother ship.”

Amber Sichler added that switching costs are only part of the story. “ICE also charges lenders steep fees to access their own data,” she said. “In a data-driven industry, that dynamic should weigh heavily in every core LOS decision.”

Speaking of LOSs, American Pacific Mortgage is the first large IMB to implement Encompass Web, sources tell The Scoop. APM worked w/ Larry Bailey’s Mortgage Workflow Partners on the integration for 6 months. It will be rolled out to all LOs & branches beginning Oct. 1 and the rest of the company by YE ‘26.

Programming Note: I am in Detroit & will be publishing all the happenings from Rocket Pro Experience on Tuesday instead of our usual Wednesday. If you happen to be there, hit me up on LinkedIn or text (201 994 9638).

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