A year ago Agire Mortgage Corp. was scrambling to find a new investor, and when it found one, it got a new business line in the bargain.

Robin Auerbach, Agire's co-president and chief executive officer, said that after funding dried up for her Orange, Calif., lender, she had to dip into her personal savings to meet payroll. Agire stopped making loans. Two of her three co-founders left. The staff was cut in half, to 20 employees.

"We were swimming on our own," Ms. Auerbach said last week. "I got to thinking that once I did raise the new capital, what kind of business would I run?"

Agire lived "to fight another day," she said, because of a capital infusion in January by Ron D'Vari, then a managing director and the head of structured finance at the fixed-income money management powerhouse BlackRock Inc.

Her company is making loans again, but it also is providing due diligence and loan reviews to lenders and helping them refinance borrowers into Federal Housing Administration products by contacting the borrowers and determining their eligibility. Mr. D'Vari said he spotted "a gold mine" in Agire's paperless technology and Ms. Auerbach's experience making loans for the FHA.

"There are lots of people who have identified portfolios with issues, but they don't know if they can sell, what price they can get, and what structure," he said.

Lenders traditionally relied on underwriters to determine such fundamental tenets as loan-to-value ratios, Mr. D'Vari said. During the recent mortgage boom "underwriting became passe," because Wall Street firms would buy any and all mortgages.

"At the end of the day, who really understands borrowers and the tricks they use to get a loan? Who understands where the data comes from?" he asked. "An originator has that core competency."

Before starting Agire in 2006, Ms. Auerbach was the chief operating officer of New Century Financial Corp., the Irvine subprime lender that later went bankrupt.

In an interview last year, she said she felt lucky to have lined up warehouse financing from C-Bass LLC before the liquidity crisis began. But C-Bass, a joint venture of two mortgage insurers, soon got swept up in the crisis, and by July of last year it could not longer fund Agire. (C-Bass is now being liquidated.)

Mr. D'Vari said he was part of a team at BlackRock "looking at finding ways to take advantage of market conditions" last year. He heard that Ms. Auerbach was looking for investors while he was conducting due diligence for BlackRock on another start-up, Private National Mortgage Acceptance Co. LLC, which was founded by Stanford L. Kurland, the former No. 2 executive at Countrywide Financial Corp.

(Ultimately, BlackRock and Highfields Capital Management LP invested $2 billion in PennyMac, which buys and services distressed mortgage assets.)

BlackRock allowed Mr. D'Vari to make a personal investment in Agire. (He would not say how much he invested.) At the end of last year, he said, he decided to leave BlackRock because his work on PennyMac made him want to do more than invest.

"I wanted to be a problem solver," he said. "Ultimately, it will come down to who can directly deal with the borrowers and solve the issue of their upside-down-ness."

This year Mr. D'Vari started NewOak Capital LLC, a New York firm that restructures and sells distressed assets for banks, endowments, and pension plans. James Frischling, NewOak's president, joined Agire in April as a co-president. He has been marketing the services of Agire's advisory unit, Edge Mortgage Advisory Corp., to hedge funds and financial institutions.

Mr. D'Vari is now Agire's chairman. Though plenty of companies offer services like Agire's, he said, few have "a tie-in to the capital markets."

Mr. Frischling, a former managing director and head of structured credit at Fortis Securities LLC, said banks are among Agire's "defensive" clients trying to understand the loans they hold. Private-equity and hedge funds are on the "offensive."

EdgeMac can help both groups, because bankers "need due diligence into what they own" and the investors want "insight before they bid on loans so they can make more informed decisions," he said.

Ms. Auerbach spent 10 years early in her career as an FHA lender. Last week she said she is drawing on that experience "to work with existing investment banks and others to refinance whole loans and move borrowers that qualify" into FHA mortgages. "It's great because the borrower gets assistance, and the asset holder gets relief to get the loans off their balance sheet. Many are forgiving balances to do so."