Real estate loan marketplace PeerStreet has launched and announced it has raised a $6.1 million seed fund.

Rather than crowdfunding direct real estate loans or equity, Manhattan Beach’s PeerStreet is a platform for crowdfunding commercial and residential real estate-backed securities. Chief Executive and founder Brew Johnson said the company chose to focus on securities because they thought the private real estate loan market was already running quite well.

“There are thousands of private bank lenders and lots of them have a lot of expertise on how to underwrite loans,” he said. “We didn’t want to compete with the existing lenders.”

Instead, PeerStreet bundles a diversified set of loans into a security after conducting its own due diligence process, part of which involves a proprietary, data-crunching underwriting software program.

During its private testing phase which ran April through today, the company funded more than $35 million in real estate-backed securities across 78 properties. The annualized net yield to investors to date has ranged between 7 and 12 percent, the company said. Most loans have a term of six to 24 months.

PeerStreet raised a $6.1 million seed round in the first quarter of the year. A number of prominent real estate investors participated in the round, including Dr. Michael Burry, founder of Scion Capital and a leading character in the book “The Big Short,” Guggenheim Partners, City National Bank President Chris Warmuth and Wealthfront Chief Executive Adam Nash.

Technology reporter Garrett Reim can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @garrettreim for the latest in L.A. tech news.