Closinglock, now with $12M, wants to prevent the 1 in 10 real estate transactions targeted for fraud

A TechCrunch article profiles Closinglock, an Austin-based startup founded in 2017 by Andy and Abigail White to secure real estate transactions against wire-fraud scams, announcing a $12M Series A led by Headline (total funding $16M). The company’s portal centralizes verified wiring instructions, secure document exchange, identity verification, and payment management, and reports growth to 35 employees, thousands of settlement-agent customers, and over $250B in protected transactions. Citing FBI data on rising real estate wire-fraud losses ($446M in 2022 from 2,200 victims), Closinglock plans to invest the new capital in product and technology to modernize money movement in property deals.