In the U.S., you can trade billions of dollars in Treasury bonds in a blink. Try figuring out who owns a house in a small county, and you may find yourself waiting days.
That disconnect is what Dono is betting on.
The AI-powered property records platform announced this week that it raised a $6.5 million seed round, bringing total funding to $10.2 million. The round was led by Link Ventures, with participation from lool VC and Alumni Ventures.
U.S. real estate – the largest asset class in the world, valued at more than $50 trillion – still runs on a patchwork of county records that date back centuries. Property ownership is recorded across more than 3,700 counties. The result: verifying who owns what is often slow, costly, and unclear.
“The gap isn’t just technology. Plenty of tools exist. But they aren’t built on modern infrastructure,” said Tali Gross, CEO of Dono, in the company’s announcement. “Our mission is to fundamentally improve the home closing experience by giving everyone involved – title professionals, lenders, buyers, servicers – the certainty they need without the friction that’s been accepted as ‘just how it works’ for decades.”
Dono started by working with title underwriters and national title agencies, where the pain is most acute. Title insurance still relies heavily on manual work, offshore vendors, and legacy “title plants.” Turnaround times can stretch into days. Fees vary. Quality can be inconsistent. And as firms expand into new markets, they often need to hire more people just to keep up.
Dono’s approach is to sit underneath the process, building what it calls an infrastructure layer for ownership verification. The platform collects data from counties, title plants, and customer sources; uses AI to extract and index key information from dense legal documents; encodes underwriting standards into adaptable AI; and delivers structured data through both a user interface and API.
It’s still backed by human verification. As the company noted, “accuracy isn’t negotiable in this industry.” That said, Dono claims that its product can deliver 80% faster turnaround times and allow customers to triple capacity with the same team.
“Organizations face an impossible tradeoff: accuracy, speed, or cost… pick one, maybe two,” said Tali Gross, CEO and Co-Founder of Dono. “We eliminate that choice.”
Today, Dono covers more than 700 counties across the U.S. The new funding will help the company expand county by county, with a goal of covering nearly half of U.S. states by population by the end of the year. It also plans to deepen automation while maintaining accuracy – and to move beyond title insurance into lending, mortgage servicing, and real estate investment.
It’s no secret that Miami is a major global hub for real estate investing. Increasingly though, startups solving problems in the real estate space are also finding a home in Miami. For instance, late last month, Miami startup Propy raised a $100 million credit facility to modernize title and escrow processes. Also in January, Titl raised $2.5 million to speed up property title verification. And in December, Beycome secured $2.5 million to expand AI-powered real estate platform.
Pictured above: Dono co-founders Eyal Stern (COO), Tali Gross (CEO), and Ron Likvornik (CTO).
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I am a Miami-based technology researcher and writer with a passion for sharing stories about the South Florida tech ecosystem. I particularly enjoy learning about GovTech startups, cutting-edge applications of artificial intelligence, and innovators that leverage technology to transform society for the better. Always open for pitches via Twitter @rileywk or www.RileyKaminer.com.
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