Zar started Lev Capital in 2019 and has raised nearly $5 million in seed funding, according to Crunchbase. He sold a prior startup, Dispatch, a logistics management software firm, to Vista Equity Partners in 2018.
Lev, which facilitates financings ranging from first mortgages to complex capital raises, bills itself as combining the expertise of traditional brokerage with an AI-powered database. “We can identify lenders that might not come up otherwise, predict lender pricing, tell sponsors or owners how to optimize their portfolio,” Zar said.
“Too many people are focused on trying to build technology to get rid of the humans in the transaction,” he added. “The transaction is too complex and nuanced to do that.”