UK digital mortgage broker habito has raised £5.5m in Series A funding led by Silicon Valley-based Ribbit Capital, with participation from existing investor Mosaic Ventures.
Since its launch in April 2016, the 25-person startup claims to have helped more than 20,000 people find the best mortgage to suit their needs and has completed £50 million in mortgage applications.
Habito gives customers access to over 60 lenders and 10,000 mortgage products in real-time, and helps them complete the entire application online. The company says that over 90% of its customers prefer using live chat over a phone conversation to complete and submit their mortgage application. The firm has also developed a Digital Mortgage Adviser chatbot, which it says has halved the average amount of time spent on each case.
The company says it will use the new capital to further develop its machine learning capabilities by creating a fully automated end-to-end platform which will enable it to offer new services, such as real-time mortgage approvals and automatic alerts when a better mortgage deal becomes available to registered customers.
Micky Malka, founder and general partner, Ribbit Capital says: “Mortgages are the biggest personal debt most people take on in their lifetime, and habito brings a level of transparency that customers value and expect.”
Habito has now raised a total of £8.2m, with Ribbit Capital joining an impressive list of seed and angel investors including Mosaic Ventures, Transferwise CEO Taavet Hinrikus, Funding Circle’s founder Samir Desai, and Yuri Milner.