PROJECT

Email ingestion: turning the inbox into a system of record

How I designed email ingestion for an AI-native CRE lending platform, from PRD to production in nine weeks.

Fintech

AI Product

B2B SaaS

Platform Primitive

cliff notes

Overview: Deal Analyzer turns a broker's deal package into a structured pre-screen. It extracts the data, checks it against the lender's rules, and drafts the questions to send back, so a commercial real estate lender reaches a go/no-go in minutes instead of the 24 to 48 hours their manual process takes. It is the product Hypha's leadership sees as most sellable, and the one the new sales team leads with.


Challenge: An early engineer-built skill proved the value but was not demo-ready, and more importantly it was not trustworthy to a skeptical underwriter. These are finance experts who will not take a number an AI pulled from a broker's self-interested email at face value. The design problem was to make an extraction tool both fast and believable enough for an expert to act on.


Solution: A pre-screen surface built around the expert's judgment: clean, traceable data first, with the AI's recommendation and buy box present but de-emphasized, provenance on every value, plus honest partial and empty states and a checklist that always shows what is still missing.


Impact: An end-to-end workflow, built and validated with the customer and handed to sales as the highest-confidence product to pitch. Broker response time compressed from roughly 24 hours to minutes. It also spun off a set of platform-level patterns (a generic Kanban, deal-type templates, email ingestion) that I am now driving cross-functionally across teams.

DATE

June-September 2026

MY ROLE

Product Designer

TOOLS AND TECH

  • Figma

  • FigJam

  • Claude AI

  • Linear

CORE TEAM

1 Product Designer

1 Product Manager

1 Front End Engineer
1 Full Stack Engineer

A peek into the impact of this project:

Deal Analyzer is Hypha's pre-screen for commercial real estate lending. A broker's deal package comes in, the system extracts the numbers, checks them against the lender's buy box, and drafts the questions to send back, so the underwriter reaches a confident go or no-go in minutes instead of days. I led the design end to end: discovery with our underwriter design partner, the information architecture, the empty, partial, and filled states, the provenance model that lets an expert trust every number, and the handoff to engineering. The result is the product Hypha leads with in sales, and a set of platform patterns, including email ingestion, that are now rolling out across the app.


Read more about Deal Analyzer on Hypha

© 2026 Sara Duval