Modest Beginnings
A LendingHome Origin Story
Welcome!
This is the story of a fintech startup innovating in the trillion-dollar mortgage industry.
We started with six people in a tiny room and one desk. Within 18 months, we raised $100 million in funding. The company has grown to over 200 people while keeping the engineering team lean at 35. To date, we originated more than $750 million in loans. And we’re not stopping.
This domain is broad and complex, like launching five startups at once. Somehow, we pulled it off: our engineering team built the “full stack” of the mortgage industry.
A look back
First, we created a consumer site to simplify the borrower experience. Just by logging in, borrowers can see their loan’s status, progress and any new requirements. But, for that to work…
We needed an integrated loan origination system to update our borrowers whenever our operations team made progress on their loan. So we built one. Then, we discovered…
Before approving and funding a loan, we needed a rules engine to manage and communicate our investor’s varying requirements — including exception scenarios — to our operations team and borrowers. So we built one. Then, we realized…
Once we originated and sold loans, we needed a transparent investor experience, both for investing and checking loan repayment status. Borrowers simply log in to repay and investors immediately know when they’ve been repaid. We built it that way.
And for all other loan servicing needs, like late payments, early payments, no payments, we built a system for that too.
Reflections
Looking back, this was likely crazy. No one in the mortgage industry does this — some might take on bits and pieces, but no one does it all.
At each step, we indeed considered whether to build or buy. For a time, we bootstrapped with third party help, but these systems are particularly interconnected:
- For the best customer experience, our operations team and borrowers need to be connected from origination to servicing to payoff.
- To truly innovate and become the world’s best mortgage lending marketplace, our loan origination system needs to balance the needs of both borrowers and investors continuously.
- To attract more investors, our investor portal needs to be sync with our servicing and our borrower experience.
This is all connected. We couldn’t buy — we had to build.
A look ahead
All this doesn’t come without challenges. Along the way, we made measured tradeoffs in growing the business and managing tech debt. And though today our maturing company is becoming robust and scalable, at the start, we optimized for speed to prove the business.
We learned a lot about managing our monolith, while keeping a path to service oriented architecture when we need. We scaled our teams as well as our code. This is no simple feat. We’re rebuilding the engine while flying the plane.
Without a solid engineering team, this would not have been possible. We hired the right blend of entrepreneurs, YC founders, former CTOs, software veterans and artisans with 10–15 years of consulting experience. This isn’t just about smarts, but sweat and hard work.
This is our tech team’s origin story. And we’ve only just begun. There’s still much more territory to conquer, much to learn, and many challenges to blog along the way.
Interested in being a part of it?
Join our adventure. Apply now.
