Co-Founder & CEO at Bilrost
Silvia Chen
Silvia grew up around large-scale real estate development, seeing firsthand how underwriting decisions determine whether projects move forward, and how much of the process remains manual. She now leads Bilrost, building autonomous loan infrastructure to modernize real estate finance. She previously led product at Blockchain.com, where her team drove 30x trading volume growth and secured over $1B in AUM. Earlier, she worked with AI pioneer David Ferrucci at Bridgewater and conducted deep learning research at MIT.
Questions & Answers
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
A CEO of a public lending company initially refused to meet me. He said it would be a waste of time. After seeing the workflow run live, he paused and said, “This is the best thing I’ve seen. I want it to be live in two weeks.”
What's the story behind your company?
I grew up in a commercial real estate development family and saw how much of lending was invisible, manual work that's made of endless paperwork underwriting spreadsheets, and back-and-forth just to move capital. After building large-scale financial infrastructure and working in AI, I realized something surprising: in a multi-trillion-dollar market, most underwriting is still moving numbers between documents. Bilrost started with a simple idea — loan processing shouldn’t be manual. We’re building the AI infrastructure layer that turns messy deal packages into structured, model-ready output in minutes instead of days.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
We combine deep AI and financial infrastructure experience with direct market access. Our technical team has previously built and operated large scale financial systems and AI infrastructure. We know how to take complex automation from prototype to production inside conservative, regulated environments. We are also backed by Johnson Development Associates, one of the largest CRE borrowers in the country. JDA has been actively championing Bilrost to senior executives at their lending partners, including some of the largest CRE banks in the U.S. This combination of technical depth and institutional pull positions us uniquely to modernize real estate lending from the inside.
