HousingWire Names Tidalwave Co-Founder Cheng Li to its 2026 Insider Award
HousingWire is proud to announce the 2026 class of Insiders, recognizing 85 operational leaders whose expertise, execution and leadership are helping shape the future of the housing industry.
Now in its 11th year, the Insiders award honors the professionals whose behind-the-scenes contributions fuel innovation, strengthen organizations and deliver meaningful business results. This year’s honorees represent every corner of the housing ecosystem, including mortgage lending and servicing, real estate, technology, and finance. While they may not always be the public face of their organizations, these leaders are trusted problem-solvers, strategic operators and collaborative partners who turn ambitious goals into measurable outcomes.
“The HousingWire Insiders award recognizes the operational leaders whose expertise and execution help their organizations thrive,” said HousingWire Editor in Chief Sarah Wheeler. “For more than a decade, we’ve celebrated the professionals who solve complex challenges, lead critical initiatives and make a lasting impact behind the scenes. Their work is essential not only to their companies, but to the continued advancement of the housing industry.”
The 2026 honorees were selected by HousingWire’s selection committee based on the significance of their contributions, their leadership in execution, and the measurable impact they have made within their organizations and across the industry.
“The best strategies in mortgage and real estate don’t execute themselves — Insiders make them real. These are the professionals who build the systems, run the processes, and carry the weight of organizational performance every single day. This year’s class is exceptional, and HousingWire is proud to recognize the people who quietly power this industry.”
2026 Insider: Cheng Li
Cheng Li is co-founder, head of TechOps and chief information security officer at Tidalwave, where he leads the engineering and infrastructure behind the company’s AI-powered mortgage technology platform.
Over the past 12 months, Li has focused on building enterprise-grade infrastructure that supports customers’ lending operations while addressing complex underwriting and compliance challenges. Working closely with First Colony Mortgage, he led the development of a platform that automatically ingests, categorizes and validates 500- to 700-page loan packages, reducing a process that previously required two to four hours of manual review to approximately five minutes. The platform now supports multiple lenders across Tidalwave’s customer base and has helped automate up to 70% of manual tasks while reducing loan closing timelines from 45 days to fewer than 15.
Li also played a key role in Tidalwave’s collaboration with Columbia University’s DAPLab to develop the first public benchmark measuring AI performance on mortgage compliance questions. In testing across 90 real-world origination scenarios, Tidalwave’s system achieved a 95% accuracy rate on critical compliance decisions. Throughout the project, Li emphasized privacy-first engineering by maintaining safeguards that protect borrower information while continuing to improve system performance.
By combining scalable infrastructure, customer-focused product development and secure AI implementation, Li continues to help advance Tidalwave’s technology platform and support lenders adopting AI within highly regulated mortgage environments.
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