PALM BEACH, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb 10, 2026--
Dono, an AI-powered property records platform that turns fragmented county records into usable ownership data, today announced it raised a $6.5 million seed round ($10.2 million in total funding). The round was led by Link Ventures with participation from lool VC and Alumni Ventures.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260210668649/en/
In the United States, the world's largest asset class—valued at over $50 trillion—is effectively built on a foundation of unsearchable paper. While billions of dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds can trade in nanoseconds, U.S. real estate transactions are still tethered to a fragmented county-level system built centuries ago.
Property ownership in the U.S. runs on 300 years of fragmented records across 3,700+ counties. Verifying who owns what is still slow, expensive, and opaque. Approximately 14% of real estate closings are delayed, spanning at least three to seven days, usually due to title-related issues, making real-time or even near-real-time closings difficult to achieve scale. Today, Dono covers more than 700 counties across the United States. Dono is building modular infrastructure to make property records clear, accessible, and instant at a fraction of current costs, delivered via both UI and API to fit into existing workflows.
Dono started in title insurance, working with title underwriters and national title agencies, where the need is immediate, and the operational cost of manual work is unavoidable. That model is becoming increasingly strained as more than 50% of the current workforce is expected to retire by 2030. The company is already seeing demand expand into adjacent markets, including lenders, mortgage servicers, and real estate investment firms.
“The gap isn’t just technology. Plenty of tools exist. But they aren’t built on modern infrastructure,” said Tali Gross, CEO of Dono. “Our mission is to fundamentally improve the home closing experience by giving everyone involved—title professionals, lenders, buyers, servicers—the certainty they need without the friction that’s been accepted as ‘just how it works’ for decades.”
Most organizations still rely on manual processes, offshore vendors, and legacy title plants, with unpredictable fees, multi-day turnaround times, and inconsistent quality. That approach breaks down as companies expand into more markets, because traditional solutions require proportional increases in headcount to keep up.
Dono is designed to remove that staffing-dependent bottleneck by building the infrastructure layer underneath ownership verification. The platform includes four modular capabilities that work independently or together. These include data collection across counties, title plants, and customer sources; AI-powered extraction and indexing of critical information from complex documents; underwriting intelligence that encodes title expertise into AI adaptable to specific standards; and configurable data delivery in formats that work for each customer.
The platform is backed by expert human verification because, as Dono puts it, “accuracy isn’t negotiable in this industry.”
Dono says its product can deliver 80% faster turnaround and help customers triple capacity with the same team.
“Organizations face an impossible tradeoff: accuracy, speed, or cost…pick one, maybe two,” said Tali Gross, CEO and Co-Founder of Dono. “We eliminate that choice.”
The seed funding will be used to accelerate geographic expansion by building county-level infrastructure market by market, with a goal of covering nearly 50% of U.S. states by population by the end of the year. The funding will also be used to deepen the company’s technology by increasing automation and efficiency for customers without compromising accuracy and expand beyond title insurance to support growing demand from lenders, mortgage servicers, and real estate investment firms.
Dono is headquartered in Tel Aviv with operations in Palm Beach, Florida.
About Dono
Dono is an AI-powered, modular property records intelligence platform building the infrastructure to make property data clear, accessible, and instant. Property records are fragmented across 3,700+ counties with no unified system, making verification slow, expensive, and opaque. Dono turns fragmented county records into usable ownership data through software delivered via both UI and API and backed by expert human verification. Dono is advised by Shay Wininger (Lemonade Co-Founder & President), Matan Bar (Melio Co-Founder & CEO), Ron Gura (Empathy Co-Founder & CEO), and Eyal Gura. Learn more at https://www.dono.ai/
Dono co-founders Eyal Stern (COO), Tali Gross (CEO), and Ron Likvornik (CTO)
TULKAREM, West Bank (AP) — Hanadi Abu Zant hasn’t been able to pay rent on her apartment in the occupied West Bank for nearly a year after losing her permit to work inside Israel. When her landlord calls the police on her, she hides in a mosque.
“My biggest fear is being kicked out of my home. Where will we sleep, on the street?” she said, wiping tears from her cheeks.
She is among some 100,000 Palestinians whose work permits were revoked after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the war in the Gaza Strip. Confined to the occupied territory, where jobs are scarce and wages far lower, they face dwindling and dangerous options as the economic crisis deepens.
Some have sold their belongings or gone into debt as they try to pay for food, electricity and school expenses for their children. Others have paid steep fees for black-market permits or tried to sneak into Israel, risking arrest or worse if they are mistaken for militants.
Israel, which has controlled the West Bank for nearly six decades, says it is under no obligation to allow Palestinians to enter for work and makes such decisions based on security considerations. Thousands of Palestinians are still allowed to work in scores of Jewish settlements across the West Bank, built on land they want for a future state.
The World Bank has warned that the West Bank economy is at risk of collapse because of Israel’s restrictions. By the end of last year, unemployment had surged to nearly 30% compared with around 12% before the war, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
Before the war, tens of thousands of Palestinians worked inside Israel, mainly in construction and service jobs. Wages can be more than double those in the landlocked West Bank, where decades of Israeli checkpoints, land seizures and other restrictions have weighed heavily on the economy. Palestinians also blame the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in parts of the territory, for not doing enough to create jobs.
About 115,000 Palestinians had work permits that were revoked after the outbreak of the war. Israel initially reinstated around 8,000 according to a report last year from Gisha, an Israeli group advocating for Palestinian freedom of movement. An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity in accordance with regulations, provided a similar figure for reinstated permits last month.
Wages earned in Israel injected some $4 billion into the Palestinian economy in 2022, according to the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank. That’s equivalent to about two-thirds of the Palestinian Authority's budget that year.
An Israeli official said Palestinians do not have an inherent right to enter Israel, and that permits are subject to security considerations. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war, territories the Palestinians want for a future state. Some 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, along with over 500,000 Israeli settlers who can come and go freely.
The war in Gaza has brought a spike in Palestinian attacks on Israelis as well as settler violence. Military operations that Israel says are aimed at dismantling militant groups have caused heavy damage in the West Bank and displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians.
After her husband left her five years ago, Abu Zant secured a job at a food-packing plant in Israel that paid around $1,400 a month, enough to support her four children. When the war erupted, she thought the ban would only last a few months. She baked pastries for friends to scrape by.
Hasan Joma, who ran a business in Tulkarem before the war helping people find work in Israel, said Palestinian brokers are charging more than triple the price for a permit.
While there are no definite figures, tens of thousands of Palestinians are believed to be working illegally in Israel, according to Esteban Klor, professor of economics at Israel's Hebrew University and a senior researcher at the INSS. Some risk their lives trying to cross Israel’s separation barrier, which consists of 9-meter high (30-foot) concrete walls, fences and closed military roads.
Shuhrat Barghouthi’s husband has spent five months in prison for trying to climb the barrier to enter Israel for work, she said. Before the war, the couple worked in Israel earning a combined $5,700 a month. Now they are both unemployed and around $14,000 in debt.
“Come and see my refrigerator, it’s empty, there’s nothing to feed my children,” she said. She can’t afford to heat her apartment, where she hasn’t paid rent in two years. She says her children are often sick and frequently go to bed hungry.
Sometimes she returns home to see her belongings strewn in the street by the landlord, who has been trying to evict them.
Of the roughly 48,000 Palestinians who worked in Israeli settlements before the war, more than 65% have kept their permits, according to Gisha. The Palestinians and most of the international community view the settlements, which have rapidly expanded in recent years, as illegal.
Israeli officials did not respond to questions about why more Palestinians are permitted to work in the settlements.
Palestinians employed in the settlements, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, say their employers have beefed up security since the start of the war and are far more willing to fire anyone stepping out of line, knowing there are plenty more desperate for work.
Two Palestinians working in the Mishor Adumim settlement said security guards look through workers’ phones and revoke their permits arbitrarily.
Israelis have turned to foreign workers to fill jobs held by Palestinians, but some say it’s a poor substitute because they cost more and do not know the language. Palestinians speak Arabic, but those who work in Israel are often fluent in Hebrew.
Raphael Dadush, an Israeli developer, said the permit crackdown has resulted in costly delays.
Before the war, Palestinians made up more than half his workforce. He’s tried to replace them with Chinese workers but says it’s not exactly the same. He understands the government’s decision, but says it’s time to find a way for Palestinians to return that ensures Israel’s security.
Assaf Adiv, the executive director of MAAN Workers Association, an Israeli group advocating for Palestinian labor rights, says there has to be some economic integration or there will be “chaos.”
“The alternative to work in Israel is starvation and desperation,” he said.
An Israeli checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank near the West Bank village of Nilin, Monday, Jan. 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
Palestinian public transportation drivers play cards while they wait for passengers at the main bus station, in the West Bank city of Tulkarem Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
Palestinian laborer Shuhrat Barghouthi shows her empty fridge, saying that she struggles to buy food after Israel revoked work permits for Palestinians in the West Bank city of Tulkarem Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
A Palestinian street vendor displays fruits and vegetables for sale in the West Bank city of Tulkarem Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
A Palestinian laborer who works inside a West Bank Israeli industrial zone maintains the garden at his house, in the West Bank city of Jericho, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
