Sela, the market-leading voice AI system for mortgage sales, has announced a total of $21 million in funding across Seed and Series A, led by Costanoa, with participation from Emergence Capital. Sela’s AI agents currently help loan officers originate more than $1 billion in new mortgages per month, and the company has crossed $10 million in annualized run-rate revenue in 18 months. Six of the ten largest independent mortgage banks now use Sela.
Sela will use the funding to grow its team and continue developing agents that guide borrowers through the entire consumer finance journey. Sela’s AI agents answer complex questions, build rapport, educate borrowers, and bring in a loan officer when necessary. Its agents are built to maximize conversion, benefiting from hundreds of optimizations and A/B tests to create a system designed to consistently outperform human teams and other AI solutions. Sela designs, runs, and continuously improves its agents for each lender, measuring success in borrowers reached, productive conversations held, and loans closed, rather than minutes used.
Large lenders typically A/B test Sela’s agents against existing systems before rolling out widely. In one A/B test involving more than 10,000 prospective borrowers, Sela produced a 9% increase in lead-to-lock rates, yielding more than 40% higher profit for the lender than its existing process. In an A/B test with a top-five mortgage servicer, Sela outperformed another voice AI solution by 41% on a lead-to-lock basis across more than 7,000 leads.
Sela was founded by Nate Becker, a former co-founder of VoiceOps and a data scientist at LinkedIn, and Vahe Tshitoyan, a former senior machine learning engineer and tech lead at Google. The company currently has 17 full-time employees and plans to grow to 50 over the next year, hiring across product, engineering, and go-to-market roles. Sela is headquartered in San Francisco.
KEY QUOTES:
“At my last company, I watched the strongest salespeople outperform the average by three or four times, and how hard it was to coach an entire team to that level. Sela’s agents take the best performing sales behaviors, learned across tens of millions of calls, and employ them consistently across every customer interaction. Automating the mortgage process with AI doesn’t actually help anyone unless it improves the experience for consumers and makes the process more effective for lenders. We have built a system that does both of these things, and we’ve proven it works at scale. In the next 12 months, our AI agents will run more of the mortgage sales process, as we aim to make financial decisions less anxiety-inducing, more pleasant, cheaper, and easier for consumers.”
Nate Becker, Co-Founder and CEO, Sela
“Every lender’s P&L comes down to the same two numbers: conversion and cost per funded loan, and both are under more pressure right now than at any point in a decade. What convinced us to lead was that Nate and Vahe fundamentally sell the ability to do more funded loans. That’s why six of the ten largest independent mortgage banks put Sela in production in under two years.”
David Cheng, Partner, Costanoa
