Cap Orbit vs Blooma: The Investment Team vs the Lender’s Screen

Credit where due

What Blooma does well on the lending side.

Start with what is real. Blooma has operated since its 2020 launch as a screening and intelligence layer for CRE lenders, sitting on top of the loan origination and customer-relationship systems a bank already owns rather than replacing them. Inbound deals are screened against the institution’s own lending criteria across more than 5,000 data points, and the platform processes over $20 billion in loans annually for customers that have included Regions Bank and Sunwest Bank.

On data, the two take different routes. Cap Orbit reads whatever lands in the deal file, broker materials, lender PDFs, scanned pages, spreadsheets, exactly like a real deal folder, with the firm’s market-data tools alongside. Market data is Blooma’s ground: it integrates third-party CRE data for comps and market and submarket reads, and its Portfolio Intelligence module watches loan metrics with trigger-based alerts off market data. If your risk process depends on a vendor watching the market for you, that is Blooma’s seat.

The pitch numbers are the vendor’s own: up to 85% less origination processing time, and 50% more transactions on the same headcount. Two tiers split by size, Blooma Pro for teams under four members originating below $500 million a year, and Blooma Enterprise above that line, where portfolio monitoring and dedicated support come in.

Where Cap Orbit wins

It builds the model and writes the memo.

Cap Orbit’s job begins where a screening layer stops: producing the work. The terminal has the run of the deal file. One instruction reads across every file in the deal at once, the offering memo, the rent roll buried in a workbook tab, the T-12, the loan agreement, and comes back with real work product: Excel workbooks with live formulas, Word memos in the firm’s format, decks and bound PDFs, written back into the deal file, with your analyst approving each consequential step. It is the difference between asking a question about a document and getting back the workbook, memo, and record.

The work holds up to the trace. The rent roll comes out unit by unit, every figure traced to the exact file, sheet, and row or page it came from and footed to the document’s own stated totals. The model is a real Excel workbook with live formulas and no hardcodes, built to the institutional standard for the asset class, with Base, Upside, and Downside re-priced off one switch and a sensitivity grid flexing exit cap and exit NOI.

The credit work is native, not a courtesy to the debt side. Debt sizes to the binding constraint, the lesser of LTV, LTC, DSCR, and debt-yield tests, against movable conservative house caps (65% max LTV, 70% max LTC, a 1.25x minimum DSCR, an 8% minimum debt yield), with year-by-year coverage and breakeven occupancy. The credit memo then writes the lender case downside-first: borrower, facility, rate, term, LTV, DSCR, debt yield, and then the downside, with the outline approved section by section before a word is drafted and every figure pulled from the model’s computed cells or footnoted to a cited document.

And the work carries past the wire. Closing reconciles the settlement statement against the contract, the loan, and the underwrite, and writes the trued-up going-in basis back into the model. Through the hold, covenant standing is read from the loan agreement and its amendments, each test cited to its section and run on the covenant’s own stated basis, with cushions, trips or trends, consequences, and cure paths laid out. It is an internal read for the team, not a certificate to the lender, and it says so plainly.

The boundary

Neither product does the other’s job.

Blooma is clear about what it is not: by its own positioning it is an insights engine, not an origination system, a relationship system, or a data provider. Its materials describe a data aggregation and analysis layer rather than a spreadsheet or modeling application, and nothing public describes drafting an IC or credit memo, abstracting a closing, or tracking a budget against the original underwrite through the hold. The screen ends where the write-up begins.

Cap Orbit works the other end of the stack: its data source is the deal’s own documents, and it produces the underwrite, the memo, and the record. It pairs with the origination and relationship systems the bank already runs, and the covenant read it produces is the team’s own internal standing. The approve-or-decline decision stays with the team that owns it.

This is the rare comparison where both vendors would likely sign the other’s description. The real risk is buying one to do the other’s job.

Who picks which

Pick by the job, not the category.

If you run origination operations at a bank, credit union, or insurance lender, and the bottleneck is inbound volume, screening consistency, and watching the book, look at Blooma. It was built for that seat, it layers onto the systems your team already runs, and the investment-team work this page describes is not what you would be buying.

If you are a deal team on either side of the capital stack, the test is who builds the model and who writes the memo. A credit team or debt fund that underwrites and holds positions does both, every cycle, and that is Cap Orbit’s ground: the source-traced extract, the workbook that ties out, the downside-first credit memo, covenant standing through the hold. The team runs the numbers and drafts the documents. The approve-or-decline decision stays yours.