Trovy Founders TJ Milani & Ashley Harris: $25M Home Equity Fintech
American homeowners are sitting on trillions of dollars in home equity. Many of those same homeowners are still carrying credit card debt at rates north of 20%.
TJ Milani and Ashley Harris think that gap is a real business opportunity, not just a talking point. Their company, Trovy, has now raised $15 million in Series A funding, bringing total funding to $25 million in under two years.
The round was led by Left Lane Capital, with existing seed investors Kleiner Perkins, DCM Ventures, and Camber Creek all returning to participate.
The Founders' Fintech Pedigree
Milani serves as CEO, and Harris as COO, and both bring direct fintech lending experience rather than coming to this problem cold.
Left Lane Capital partner Henry Toole pointed specifically to their combined background at Figure, SoFi, and JPMorgan as a key reason his firm chose to lead this round, describing the founders as having built something rare, backed by credentials to match.
Harris specifically brings legal and operational depth to the team, having previously served as General Counsel at Clara Lending before co-founding Trovy.
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What Trovy Actually Sells
Trovy's core product is a home equity-backed credit card, issued through Cross River Bank under a Mastercard license, that lets homeowners borrow against their home equity at meaningfully lower rates than typical unsecured consumer credit.
As of Trovy's Series A announcement, rates started as low as 5.99% variable APR with autopay, with representative rates closer to 9.49% for borrowers with strong credit profiles, a significant gap compared to typical credit card APRs above 20%.
Lines go up to $250,000, sized to the equity a homeowner has actually built up rather than a generic unsecured credit limit.
Here's the structural detail that matters most: Trovy operates as a licensed consumer lender, not merely a fintech layered on top of a bank partnership.
That gives the company direct control over underwriting, product experience, and risk, rather than depending entirely on a partner bank's risk appetite and product constraints.
Beyond the Card
Trovy isn't positioning itself as just a lending product.
The company has also built a homeowner management hub, offering maintenance reminders, document storage for insurance policies and warranties, and tools meant to help owners track and protect their home's value over time.
The strategic logic is straightforward: keep homeowners inside the Trovy ecosystem for reasons beyond just borrowing, so the company becomes a recurring financial touchpoint rather than a one-time credit product.
That expansion continues this summer with a second product called 1Loan, a HELOC specifically aimed at home purchases and refinances, meeting borrowers earlier in their homeownership journey rather than only after they already have a mortgage.
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The Traction So Far
Trovy launched its first product in June 2025. Within about 18 months of founding, the company expanded its active lending footprint to 27 states, with licensing secured in 30.
That's a genuinely fast regulatory rollout for a licensed lender, a category where state-by-state compliance requirements typically slow expansion considerably compared to software-only fintech products.
The Honest Read
Trovy is entering a large but well-understood market. Home equity lending isn't a new category, and plenty of banks and fintechs already offer HELOCs and home equity lines in some form.
Trovy's real bet is packaging, positioning a home equity credit card as an everyday spending tool rather than a one-time cash-out loan, combined with the broader "homeowner hub" ecosystem to build a stickier customer relationship than a single loan product typically creates.
The risk worth watching is rate sensitivity. Home equity products are directly exposed to interest rate conditions and housing market health in a way many other consumer fintech categories aren't, and Trovy's growth story will be tested by whatever happens to both over the next few years, not just by its own execution.
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