Elio Mortgage, an AI-native mortgage company redesigning how home loans are originated, today emerged from stealth with $5.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Motive Partners and Social Leverage, with Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director of Insight Partners, participating as an angel investor.

The company was founded by Oren Michaely, whose background spans engineering at Microsoft and Director of AI at Motive Partners, and Arad Lev Ari, who previously worked in real estate investing and investment banking at KKR and Deutsche Bank. Elio is redesigning mortgage origination end-to-end, using AI to transform how mortgage companies operate and ultimately aim to rewrite the economics of originating a loan. The funding will support continued product development, the expansion of Elio’s licensed mortgage operations nationwide, and the recruitment of loan officers as the company scales its AI-native brokerage model.

For decades, mortgage technology has focused on improving individual parts of the origination process, leaving loan officers and operations teams to connect fragmented systems and workflows themselves. Elio is taking a different approach by building its proprietary AI-native platform from inside a working mortgage operation, where engineers and loan officers work side by side. That live environment allows the company to redesign origination from within the workflow rather than trying to solve it from the outside with point solutions. The company is also using that same infrastructure to serve as the embedded mortgage arm for financial advisors, real estate agents, home builders and institutional owners of single-family rental portfolios, enabling businesses with trusted customer relationships and built-in mortgage demand to offer mortgage services without building and operating a mortgage business themselves.

“Mortgage is one of the largest financial markets in the world, yet the way loans are originated has changed remarkably little,” said Oren Michaely, CEO and Co-Founder of Elio Mortgage. “The industry has spent years digitizing individual processes, but people are still responsible for stitching those processes together. AI gives us the opportunity to redesign the entire origination model, changing how work is divided between people and technology, how organizations are structured, the cost of originating a loan, and the borrower experience. We’re building Elio to show what a fundamentally better mortgage company can look like.”

“The next generation of financial services are being built around AI, with intelligence systems coordinating and executing work across the business rather than automating isolated tasks,” said Harsh Govil, Partner, Venture at Motive Partners. “In truly AI-native companies, the technology largely disappears into the operating model, while customers and employees experience a fundamentally faster and improved service. We believe Elio represents that shift in mortgage, an industry where we see enormous opportunity to redesign operations and economics.”

“We invest in founders who challenge entrenched industries with new business models, and Elio represents exactly that kind of opportunity,” said Matt Ober, Managing Director, Social Leverage. “By combining an AI-native operating model with an embedded distribution strategy, Elio enables financial advisors and other businesses with trusted customer relationships to make mortgage financing a seamless extension of the services they already provide. We look forward to supporting them as they redefine how borrowers access home financing.”

About Elio Mortgage

Elio Mortgage is an AI-native mortgage company rebuilding mortgage origination from the ground up. Rather than selling software into the industry, Elio operates a licensed mortgage operation powered by its proprietary agentic platform. Elio uses the platform to transform the processes and unit economics of origination, improving the experience and economics for both loan officers and borrowers. Within Elio’s brokerage, the platform gives loan officers the leverage to focus on relationships, advice and judgment while serving more borrowers, and growing their books of business. Through Elio Embedded, the same platform enables Elio to serve as the mortgage arm for RIAs, real estate agents, home builders, and single-family rental operators, helping them capture mortgage demand already flowing through their businesses without taking on the operational complexity of mortgage origination. For more information, visit www.elio.mortgage.

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