CertifID, an Austin, Texas-based wire fraud prevention company, has acquired Closinglock, an escrow management and secure-payments platform based in the same city, the companies announced Thursday.
It’s CertifID’s second acquisition in four months. In June, it bought CloseSimple, the closing communication and automation platform used by hundreds of title companies across the country.
With both deals, CertifID now employs about 220 people and serves more than 3,000 title companies and 35,000 title professionals nationwide. Terms weren’t disclosed.
Both companies are claiming significant scale. CertifID says it protected 1.55 million transactions in 2025 and has recovered $145 million in stolen funds. Closinglock says it has protected more than $900 billion across more than 2 million transactions since its founding.
Together, the companies expect to protect 2.5 million transactions this year. That’s up about 60 percent from CertifID’s 2025 total, though some of that may be overlap with existing customers.
For context, the National Association of Realtors counted roughly 4.06 million existing-home sales last year.
The two companies have raised more than $130 million combined. CertifID has raised $80 million to date from Arthur Ventures and Centana Growth Partners. Closinglock has raised $50 million from Sageview Capital, Headline and Live Oak Ventures.
The acquisition is timely given rising real estate fraud costs.
CertifID cites FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center data showing that real estate fraud losses grew more than twice as fast as overall reported cybercrime losses last year. It also says business email compromise scams, where real estate wire fraud is a top target, topped $3 billion in losses.
“Title companies are being asked to protect more, move faster and deliver a better experience at a time when the risks have never been greater,” said Tyler Adams, CEO and co-founder of CertifID, in a statement. “The challenges facing the real estate industry are real, persistent, and bigger than any one company or product can solve alone. By bringing our technology and expertise together, we seek to stay ahead of emerging threats while elevating the closing experience.”
1 roof, 2 product lines
The deal brings two better-known names in wire verification and secure payments under one roof. For title companies, that raises obvious questions about pricing leverage and product overlap.
For now, the companies say nothing changes for customers.
Tyler Adams
Both products and their existing integrations will stay in place. CertifID says it will keep investing in an “open ecosystem” across title production systems, underwriters and third-party platforms. That also means CertifID will be running two overlapping product lines for the foreseeable future. It hasn’t said when or whether they’ll merge.
The optimistic read is that title agents are squeezed by low transaction volume and a sprawling vendor stack, and they would welcome fewer logins and one contract.
Adams framed the deal in those terms, calling it additive rather than disruptive.
“With continued headwinds in the real estate market, our responsibility is to deliver more protection and value for our customers without asking them to change platforms or restructure workflows,” Adams said.
A bigger ambition than fraud prevention
Taken together, the CloseSimple and Closinglock deals suggest CertifID no longer wants to be seen as a point solution.
Its company boilerplate now calls it “the closing platform” rather than a fraud-prevention tool. The new tagline, “verified once, trusted throughout,” describes a model where identities, accounts and funds are verified at the start of a deal and that trust carries through to disbursement.
Andy White
That positioning puts CertifID closer to full closing-software players. Andy White, CEO and co-founder of Closinglock, said the companies’ tools were always meant to work together.
“Separately, our companies have solved some of the hardest problems in real estate fraud and made groundbreaking advancements in how real estate is paid for, and these capabilities belong together,” White said. “By coming together, we will move faster and build the infrastructure to protect the real estate transaction from start to finish.”
Adams will lead the combined company, and White becomes chief strategy officer.
CertifID was founded in 2017, after its co-founders’ Grand Rapids, Michigan, title company lost $180,000 to wire fraud. It’s now building toward something much bigger than a fix for that problem.
