Elio Mortgage has stepped out of stealth after securing $5.1 million in pre-seed capital, positioning itself as an AI-first brokerage rather than another vendor selling point tools to lenders.
Motive Partners and Social Leverage led the round, with Insight Partners co-founder Jeff Horing joining as an angel investor.
The New York-based company plans to put the money toward product work, broader state licensing, and hiring more loan officers as it scales a live origination business.
The firm was started in January 2026 by Oren Michaely and Arad Lev Ari, childhood friends from Israel who arrived at mortgages from different paths. Michaely previously worked in engineering at Microsoft and later served as director of AI at Motive Partners.
Lev Ari spent time in investment banking at Deutsche Bank and real estate investing at KKR. Instead of building software to sell into existing shops, they chose to operate a licensed brokerage themselves so engineers and originators could redesign the process from inside a real pipeline.
That approach included buying Florida-based Hightide Mortgage, which gave Elio an active book of business, early licenses, and a small group of loan officers to work alongside.
The purchase price was not disclosed. Since launch, the company says it has grown to about 40 loan officers and roughly $200 million in trailing 12-month volume.
It reports licenses in 22 states, with a goal of about 30 by year-end covering most of the US population.
Most of its 11 employees sit in engineering and product; loan officers are contractors concentrated in markets such as Florida and Texas.
Elio’s pitch is that mortgage technology has spent years digitizing isolated steps while people still glue those steps together.
The company is building an agentic platform meant to coordinate work across origination, from application through closing, so loan officers spend more time on advice and relationships.
It also wants to act as an embedded mortgage arm for financial advisors, real estate agents, homebuilders, and owners of single-family rental portfolios, handling the operational burden while those partners keep the client relationship.
Investors framed the opportunity around a large, fragmented market. Independent brokers originate a sizable share of US mortgage volume, yet much of the work remains manual.
Motive’s Harsh Govil argued that owning the brokerage lets Elio rebuild borrower and loan-officer experience while changing unit economics underneath.
Social Leverage’s Matt Ober pointed to the combination of an AI operating model and distribution through existing relationships.
Michaely has said the goal is not to replace loan officers but to give them more capacity, with a longer-term view of far higher monthly closings per officer if coordination work can be automated.
The launch lands in a crowded field of AI mortgage experiments, including other young broker and “AI loan officer” startups.
Elio is focusing first on purchase loans rather than a refinance-heavy mix, acknowledging that higher rates still weigh on the cycle even as a slower market helped it acquire a brokerage. Capital will now go toward expanding licenses, recruiting originators, and tightening the feedback loop between live files and the software meant to run them.