Elio Mortgage, a New York company that runs a licensed mortgage brokerage on its own AI software, came out of stealth on 29 September 2026 with $5.1m in pre-seed funding.
Motive Partners and Social Leverage co-led the round. Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director of Insight Partners, invested as an angel. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Before raising, Elio bought Hightide Mortgage, a Florida brokerage, according to Dealroom News. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Mortgage is one of the largest financial markets in the world, yet the way loans are originated has changed remarkably little.”Oren Michaely, CEO and Co-Founder, Elio Mortgage
What Elio Mortgage does
Elio does not sell software to lenders. Instead it operates its own mortgage brokerage and builds its software inside that business, with engineers and loan officers working together. The company says this lets it redesign the whole process of originating a loan, rather than automating one step at a time, and lower the cost of each loan.
Within the brokerage, the software is meant to take on routine work so that loan officers can spend more time on advice and client relationships and serve more borrowers. "Bringing loan officers and engineers together gives us a tight feedback loop to build, test and refine the technology," Michaely said, according to Dealroom News.
It also offers a service called Elio Embedded, which lets financial advisers, real estate agents, home builders and owners of single-family rental portfolios offer mortgages to their own customers without running a mortgage business themselves.
The company was founded by chief executive Oren Michaely, who worked as an engineer at Microsoft and was director of AI at Motive Partners, and chief operating officer Arad Lev Ari, who worked in real estate investing at KKR and investment banking at Deutsche Bank. Dealroom News reported that Elio was founded in January.
Building on an acquired brokerage
Hightide had eight loan officers and licences in two states when Elio bought it, according to Dealroom News, citing This Week in Fintech. The deal gave Elio an existing book of business to build its software around.
Elio now has about 40 loan officers and handles about $200m in loans over the past 12 months, according to Dealroom News and AlleyWatch. It is licensed in 22 states and expects to reach 30 by the end of the year, which Dealroom News said would cover about 80% of the US population.
Lev Ari told AlleyWatch that mortgage is a cyclical business and that an efficient operating model was central to the company's strategy.
"Getting licensed in all these states is just such a time suck," Lev Ari said, according to Dealroom News.
What the money is for
Elio said the funding would go towards product development, expanding its licensed mortgage operations across the country and hiring more loan officers.
Harsh Govil, a venture partner at Motive Partners, said in the announcement that in AI-native companies the technology largely disappears into the operating model. Matt Ober, managing director at Social Leverage, said the firm backs founders who take on entrenched industries with new business models.
Elio is entering a field where other startups are also building AI mortgage businesses. HousingWire named Ralo, which raised $2.9m in seed funding in June, and Copperlane, which raised $4.1m in seed funding led by TQ Ventures.
Company website: elio.mortgage