Mortgage rates began to rise in 2022 after reaching record lows at the beginning of the pandemic and never fell again.
30 years Mortgage Rate Today, hovering above 6.5% (as low as 2.49% in 2020!), buying a home is simply not something that many people can achieve.
A Denver-based startup is helping change that. Founded in 2022, Multiply by mortgage Initially set out to help tech employees get some value in compensation for their equity when their employers are still private.
But interestingly, founders Michael White and Gautam Gupta – alumni of Plaza, opendoor, doordash and Uber – have observed that most employees are using their mobility to make home purchases and related expenses.
“For many Americans, home ownership is becoming increasingly out of reach, and we don’t want interest rates to drop to the levels seen in 2020 in 2020,” White told TechCrunch.
So in July 2024, the startup changed its courses to provide mortgage benefits programs to help employees of its partner companies, including companies like Anduril and Ramp, navigate their home purchases.
Today, Mupperly offers employees a 1:1, a 1:1, employee education courses around the home purchase and financing process, and mortgage rate discounts up to 0.75%. The startup works with a network of 15-20 lenders to get discounted rates.
Claims CEO White claims that this is not smart for the company because they don’t incur any costs, and what he calls “low management overhead” to provide the plan.
“We did create a mortgage category,” he told TechCrunch. He said traditional lenders are actually their main competition, but the startup aims to differentiate itself by employers’ focus on financial health, in addition to its discounted interest rates.
The company exclusively told TechCrunch that its hub has attracted the attention of Storied Venture Capital company Kleiner Perkins, which has just led its $23.5 million Series A. BoxGroup, A*, Mischief and Workshop also participated in the financing, which brought the company’s total funding to $27 million since its inception in 2022. The company declined to disclose the valuation of the new round.
“Attracting and retaining top talent is the focus of every great company, and providing competitive benefits and compensation plans is the desktop,” said Mamoon Hamid, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. He believes that multiplication stands out because it works directly with employers and automates the traditionally time-consuming back-end processes.
It is worth noting that co-founder Gupta is also a general partner of investor A*, who led Multly’s $3.5 million seed round in early 2022. He began working with White’s breeding concept in late 2021, and the two co-founded the company in early 2022.
Currently multiplied by the broker and obtained a license to mortgage loans in 19 states. It also has broker partners in 26 other states and the District of Columbia. Within a few months, the startup plans to make its own actual loan.
Help people fund their homes
White said the company has helped nearly 100 people fund their homes since its hub.
Employees can log into the flight attendant’s web application through the company’s email address. Once identified as an employee, they can meet with consultants and then access their online application, trading dashboards, and education courses.
Multiply its network of lenders by its network of employees, find the lowest interest rate, and use your own discount. Multiplication can offer discounts because it has automated the mortgage origination process rather than the more traditional “very human labor-intensive process.”
“In terms of technology, we are building workflow automation and AI-driven tools to take up a lot of backend labor and make people more involved,” he explained. “This brings us a lower cost structure that we can pass through these savings in the form of lower mortgage rates.”
Multiplication is not the only company that aggregates potential lenders. Others like Lendingtree do the same. But White asserted that the biggest difference between multiplied by and lender is that the latter is more like a self-service market that finds lenders and compares. He added that the multiplication model is more of a concierge service, which is also paired with a model with lower interest rates.
Currently, the multiple has 25 employees.
It plans to use its new capital to continue investing in building its mortgage initiation platform and expand its team of mortgage consultants and corporate partners. Today, it has 23 corporate partners, including a portfolio of public and private companies across various industries.
Multiply by mortgage original committee to make money.
