Non-mortgage consumer debt in the United States has passed 5 trillion US dollars while tens of millions of homeowners sit on equity they rarely touch. Trovy, a US fintech that has just closed a 15 million US dollar Series A led by Left Lane Capital, thinks the two facts are connected and has built a product to bridge them: a home equity line of credit that works as a Mastercard.
The Fintech Times put seven written questions to the company. Ashley Harris, co-founder and chief operating officer, answered them. The round, with continued participation from seed investors Kleiner Perkins, DCM Ventures and Camber Creek, takes total funding to 25 million US dollars. The card is live in 27 states.
The problem Trovy set out to fix is a mismatch in how homeowners borrow. Harris describes the equity in a home as the cheapest financing most homeowners will ever have access to. Yet when an unexpected expense arrives, a renovation, a medical bill or simply everyday costs, she says they reach instead for a patchwork of credit cards, personal loans and specialty financing, often at rates above 20 per cent. “That mismatch is what Trovy was built to fix.”
The answer, built by Harris and her co-founder TJ Milani, is the Trovy HELOC Card, a Mastercard issued by Cross River Bank that makes a homeowner’s equity available at the point of purchase rather than through the slow, separate draw process of a traditional home equity line of credit. “Rather than stacking up high-interest debt across multiple sources, homeowners can use the equity they already have and are already paying for, at a fraction of the cost,” Harris says.
Why has that equity been so hard to reach? “The gap comes down to friction and uncertainty, not lack of demand,” Harris says. “Traditional HELOCs involve appraisals, paperwork, and underwriting that can take weeks, and even after approval, accessing funds means a separate draw request and a wait for a check or wire.” That is far too slow to compete with a credit card at the checkout, she argues, which goes a long way to explaining why homeowners default to expensive unsecured debt. Many also do not know whether they would qualify, or find the process intimidating enough not to try. Trovy’s response is a fully online application and approval process, with terms she describes as clear and transparent.
How the card works
“We underwrite homeowners using verified income, credit history, and an automated valuation of the home along with property information, including existing liens, to set a credit line,” Harris says. Once approved, the card draws directly against that equity at a mortgage rate, with no draw fees on purchases. For larger expenses, borrowers can take cash out or transfer a high-interest balance onto the line and pay it down over time, with no prepayment penalty. Homeowners draw only what they need, and there is no inactivity fee or annual fee.
On top sits a rewards scheme built around what homeowners spend on: 2 per cent cashback on home-related purchases, 1 per cent on everything else, and up to 200 US dollars in credits for home services paid for with the card. Underneath it all, Harris says, the product functions as a genuine home equity line of credit, just one that is usable the moment funds are needed.
Access to home equity is moving away from the traditional draw process towards embedded, card-based products, and Harris sees several forces behind that. “A few things are converging at once. Consumers now expect instant, digital experiences from every financial product, and a HELOC that requires a phone call and a multi-day wait feels out of step with that.” Automated valuation models and real-time income verification have matured enough to support fast, reliable underwriting on a home-secured line. “Card network rails also make it possible to embed a HELOC into a spending experience people already know how to use, rather than asking them to learn an unfamiliar draw process.”
The rate environment plays its part too. Cash-out refinancing has become unattractive to homeowners who do not want to give up a low first-mortgage rate, which is pushing more demand towards junior lien products. “Card-based access is simply the faster, more natural form that demand is taking,” Harris says.
Spending secured against the home
The obvious question for a card of this kind is whether it turns everyday unsecured spending into debt secured against the house. Harris does not pretend the card is walled off from everyday purchases. Customers do put groceries on it, she says, and Trovy is not trying to prevent that: if someone is already putting those purchases on a high-interest credit card, moving the spending to Trovy means paying far less to do the same thing.
The safeguard, in her account, is the underwriting. “What we focus on is underwriting responsibly: we look at verified income and credit history to assess a homeowner’s likelihood of being able to repay, and we look at home value and equity to make sure the line is appropriately sized against the collateral,” she says, the same discipline she expects of any responsible lender. The card also behaves like a regular credit card where it matters most to the cardholder: a customer who pays the statement balance in full has a grace period and accrues no interest, and one who carries a balance pays a fraction of the 20 per cent plus APR typical of most cards. The aim, Harris says, is not to stop everyday spending but to make it dramatically cheaper and to help homeowners borrow more responsibly than they could with high-interest debt.
What the funding buys
The 15 million US dollar Series A will go on national expansion, the product platform and the team. Concretely, Harris says, that means extending the geographic footprint beyond the current 27 states, investing in underwriting infrastructure to keep decisioning fast and accurate, and launching a second product, the 1Loan, a HELOC built for home purchases and refinances. Trovy is also building out what it calls the homeowner hub, the home management side of the platform, alongside the financing side. “This round lets us build the definitive modern platform for home equity, not just scale a single card product.”
Expansion is governed by state regulation. Trovy is live in 27 states and licensed in 30, which Harris says reflects a deliberate pace less than 18 months after founding. “Every state has its own licensing requirements, consumer protection rules, and product requirements that need to be built into our systems before we can originate loans there,” she says, and the company would rather do that work properly than rush it. “We will offer the Trovy HELOC in more states over time.”
The card itself is positioned as the entry point. “Longer term, the HELOC Card is the entry point into a broader financial home base for homeowners: financing on one side, and on the other a homeowner hub with maintenance reminders, document storage, and tools to help people protect and get more value from their largest asset,” Harris says. The next milestones the company has set out are further state launches and the release of the 1Loan purchase and refinance product.
