Two decades ago, David Rogove entered the mortgage business as a young loan processor in New York, working his way up through the ranks of a Long Island mortgage bank.
“Back then, we had what I call $80,000 to $100,000 a year typists,” he told Refresh Miami. “They were just mortgage processors. If we had agentic AI back then, it would have changed everything.”
That realization is now the backbone of Maestro AI, Rogove’s South Florida-based startup that aims to automate large parts of the mortgage process using agentic AI.
Rogove launched his own brokerage in 2012 with his younger brother and grew it into one of the largest in New York State. By 2018, he began to see what he viewed as a structural problem.
“I saw a really big hole in the space around fragmentation of the mortgage brokerage world,” he said. “I had this idea to build software around a processing network.”
That idea turned into a company, Wemlo, which he eventually sold to RE/MAX Holdings in 2021. After staying on briefly, he signed a three-year noncompete that pushed him into other tech experiments. What finally pulled him back was watching how fast AI agents were improving.
“For the first time, I saw an AI agent go out and execute a task on behalf of someone,” he said. “And I thought: this is what I always wanted to build.”
Rogove incorporated Maestro AI in June 2025. Through Y Combinator, he recruited CTO Sugi Venugeethan, a veteran engineer who began his career at Motorola’s Applied Research Center, where he built early Android widgets at age 22. Since then, Venugeethan has led data engineering and infrastructure initiatives at Fortune 100 companies, gaining deep expertise across modern software stacks and best practices. Maestro also counts Joe Roos, a local angel investor and family office CIO at ZFO, among its ranks as CFO.
“We’re building Maestro, which is basically an agentic mortgage AI for mortgage brokers and mortgage bankers,” Rogove said.
Maestro is designed to mimic what a human mortgage processor does: read documents, select lenders, submit files, run underwriting systems, and handle disclosures. Rogove describes each loan as “a script waiting to be automated.”
“With agentic AI, we can truly mimic the human processor and all of its actions for the very first time,” he said.
The system uses five modular agents to handle different stages of the loan lifecycle and includes what Rogove calls “Maestro-certified underwriting,” a light underwriting layer for early decision-making. The company is also integrating with Encompass by ICE, the dominant loan origination system in the U.S. mortgage market, which powers an estimated 40–50% of all American mortgage originations.
Maestro recently raised a $1.2 million pre-seed round led by New Stack Ventures, with participation from Family VC, ZFO, Roark’s Drift, and local angel investors.
“We have built a successful investment thesis and portfolio around allocating to outsiders who have all of the intangibles and domain expertise but may not have attended Stanford or reside in Silicon Valley,” said Nick Moran, General Partner at New Stack Ventures. “We are proud to back David Rogove and support the local South Florida tech ecosystem as we think Maestro has the potential to be an industry leader in the vertical AI mortgage space.”
The startup was also an inaugural member of the Gold Coast Tech Accelerator, supported by Related Ross, eMerge Americas, and the Florida Council of 100. From that cohort, Maestro was selected to pitch at The Breakers to Governor Ron DeSantis, Stephen Ross, Manny Medina, Melissa Medina, and other industry leaders.
“The Gold Coast Tech Accelerator is a powerful example of what can happen when business and innovation leaders come together with a shared vision for Florida’s future,” said Melissa Medina, co-founder and CEO of eMerge Americas. “Maestro […] is a testament to the positive outcomes that are possible when industry leaders help connect high-potential start-ups with mentorship, capital, and opportunity.”
Currently, Maestro’s team is about seven people, mostly engineers, with two based in South Florida.
Rogove moved here from New York in 2019 and credits the region with changing his life. He now lives in Parkland and says he has no intention of leaving.
“I want to give back to Florida because it’s given me everything,” he said. “I’m hoping to build the next unicorn here.”
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