Sela, a company developing AI voice agents for mortgage sales, has raised $21 million across Seed and Series A funding rounds. The funding was led by Costanoa, with participation from Emergence Capital.
Sela’s AI agents help loan officers communicate with potential borrowers, answer questions and guide them through the mortgage process. The company said its agents currently support the origination of more than $1 billion in new mortgages each month.
Sela has also reached $10 million in annualized run-rate revenue within 18 months of its launch.
The company’s AI agents are designed to answer complex questions, build conversations with borrowers, provide information and connect borrowers with loan officers when human support is needed.
Sela continuously tests and improves its AI agents for each lender. The company measures performance based on factors such as borrowers reached, productive conversations and completed loans.
“Every lender’s P&L comes down to the same two numbers: conversion and cost per funded loan, and both are under more pressure right now than at any point in a decade,” said David Cheng, Partner at Costanoa. “What convinced us to lead was that Nate and Vahe fundamentally sell the ability to do more funded loans. That’s why six of the ten largest independent mortgage banks put Sela in production in under two years.”
In one test involving more than 10,000 prospective borrowers, Sela said its technology increased lead-to-lock rates by 9% and generated more than 40% higher profit for the lender compared with its existing process. In another test involving more than 7,000 leads, Sela said its AI voice system outperformed another voice AI solution by 41% on a lead-to-lock basis.
Sela was founded by Nate Becker, a former VoiceOps co-founder and LinkedIn data scientist, and Vahe Tshitoyan, a former Google senior machine learning engineer and tech lead.
“At my last company, I watched the strongest salespeople outperform the average by three or four times, and how hard it was to coach an entire team to that level,” said Nate Becker, Co-Founder and CEO of Sela. “Sela’s agents take the best performing sales behaviors, learned across tens of millions of calls, and employ them consistently across every customer interaction. Automating the mortgage process with AI doesn’t actually help anyone unless it improves the experience for consumers and makes the process more effective for lenders. We have built a system that does both of these things, and we’ve proven it works at scale. In the next 12 months, our AI agents will run more of the mortgage sales process, as we aim to make financial decisions less anxiety-inducing, more pleasant, cheaper, and easier for consumers.”
The company currently has 17 full-time employees and plans to expand its team to 50 over the next year, with hiring planned across product, engineering and go-to-market roles.
Sela will use the new funding to grow its team and develop more AI agents for consumer lending, with the goal of supporting borrowers throughout the wider consumer finance journey.
