In 2018, Malik Yacoubi left a full-time executive job to start over.
That is how EY described the moment when it named him its 2026 Entrepreneur of the Year for Eastern Canada. He teamed up with co-founders, reportedly Damien Charbonneau, Karim Benabdallah and Chase Belair, and launched a digital mortgage lender in Montreal in May of that year. The business plan was plain: Canadians were borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars through a slow process, and software could make it faster.
Yacoubi has said that pairing deep vertical expertise with AI is where the magic can happen.
The reception was cold. Banks were sceptical. Brokers, the people who had always arranged mortgages, saw Nesto as a threat that could cut them out. A new lender needed both groups.
His company has made a series of hard choices. The company raised a C$76m Series B, then C$80m in December 2022, taking total funding to C$167.5m, at a moment when many fintechs were retreating.
The turn came in 2024 with the purchase of CMLS Group, described as Canada's third-largest mortgage finance company. Headcount jumped from about 350 to 1,100 overnight. Nesto was no longer just a consumer app; it administered mortgages worth tens of billions of dollars and began building white-label technology for banks and other financial institutions, the same institutions that once doubted it.
The tool behind that shift is Maestro, an AI platform the company says can underwrite a deal in under two minutes, where a human process once took a day or more. Yacoubi has said that pairing deep vertical expertise with AI is where the magic can happen.
The June 2026 Series E tells how far the company has moved. C$302m was raised, with C$107m in new capital and C$195m sold by earlier holders, at a valuation of C$1.47bn. New backers included La Caisse and Fidelity. The company reports more than C$37bn in mortgages originated that year and says it is profitable.
The lesson for a founder is in who Nesto eventually sold to. The people who looked like opponents in 2018, banks and brokers, became the customers once the product was good enough and the company was large enough to be trusted.