London-based digital savings and mortgage platform Tembo has raised £14 million in a Series B funding round led by Goodwater Capital.
Existing investors including Aviva, Ascension Ventures, Love Ventures and McPike Family Office joined the round, bringing the company’s total funding to £20 million.
Co-founded by Richard Dana, Eddie Ross and Geoff Wright at the height of the pandemic in October 2020, Tembo launched with the aim of increasing access to home ownership for first-time buyers and people facing affordability issues.
The startup's proprietary, decisioning and affordability technology, provides users with an instant comparison of affordability and costs for all the available options and buying schemes to help them buy or remortgage their home.
The firm has access to over 100 lenders, 10,000 mortgage products and 25 bespoke mortgage schemes to uncover a borrower’s true affordability, including a specialist range of Income and Deposit Boost family-mortgages.
Recently, it has added a savings app which focuses on helping customers save towards their first property purchase deposit and future financial goal via its Tembo Lifetime ISA.
In the last year, the company has helped over 4000 first time buyers to purchase their first home and 35,000 future buyers to start saving for a deposit with the ISA.
The new funding will be used to scale the savings app, launching new product lines and introduce new mortgage schemes to support a wider variety of customers.
Richard Dana, co-founder and CEO of Tembo, says: "We founded Tembo to help make homeownership happen for the hundreds of thousands of people who have been locked out of the property market in the UK. Over the past year alone, we’re proud to have helped thousands of first-time buyers buy their own home, often when they thought it was impossible."