Elio Mortgage, a New York-based mortgage company using artificial intelligence across the home loan process, has emerged from stealth with $5.1m in pre-seed funding as it targets the cost and complexity of mortgage origination.
Motive Partners and Social Leverage co-led the round, with Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director of Insight Partners, also participating as an angel investor. Elio plans to use the funding to develop its product, expand its licensed mortgage business nationwide and hire loan officers for its AI-native brokerage.
Elio said that mortgage technology has largely focused on improving individual stages of the lending process rather than connecting the full journey. This leaves loan officers and back-office teams responsible for manually coordinating multiple systems and workflows.
Rather than developing software separately from the lending process, Elio’s engineers work alongside loan officers within its mortgage operation. The company says this approach allows its technology to evolve around the practical requirements of day-to-day origination.
Elio operates as a licensed mortgage provider rather than a standalone software vendor, with an agentic platform at the core of its model. The technology is designed to handle more of the operational workload, allowing loan officers to dedicate more time to client relationships, advice and lending decisions.
The company is targeting changes to both mortgage workflows and the economics of originating loans, while enabling loan officers to serve more borrowers and build their client books. The same platform also supports Elio Embedded, through which the company provides mortgage services for registered investment advisers, real estate agents, homebuilders and owners of single-family rental portfolios.
These businesses already have relationships with potential homebuyers but would otherwise need to establish their own lending infrastructure to offer mortgage services. Elio Embedded is designed to let them provide financing as an extension of their existing customer relationships.
Elio Mortgage CEO and co-founder Oren Michaely said, “Mortgage is one of the largest financial markets in the world, yet the way loans are originated has changed remarkably little. The industry has spent years digitising individual processes, but people are still responsible for stitching those processes together. AI gives us the opportunity to redesign the entire origination model, changing how work is divided between people and technology, how organisations are structured, the cost of originating a loan, and the borrower experience. We’re building Elio to show what a fundamentally better mortgage company can look like.”
Motive Partners partner, venture Harsh Govil also commented, “The next generation of financial services are being built around AI, with intelligence systems coordinating and executing work across the business rather than automating isolated tasks. In truly AI-native companies, the technology largely disappears into the operating model, while customers and employees experience a fundamentally faster and improved service. We believe Elio represents that shift in mortgage, an industry where we see enormous opportunity to redesign operations and economics.”
Social Leverage managing director Matt Ober added, “We invest in founders who challenge entrenched industries with new business models, and Elio represents exactly that kind of opportunity. By combining an AI-native operating model with an embedded distribution strategy, Elio enables financial advisors and other businesses with trusted customer relationships to make mortgage financing a seamless extension of the services they already provide. We look forward to supporting them as they redefine how borrowers access home financing.”
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