Companies
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Better.com
Fintech
Better.com is a digital mortgage lender that provides an online platform for home loans, aiming to make the mortgage process faster and less dependent on traditional loan officers.
$1.05B
-$23.91
94.77%
30 days ago
$25.23
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Better.com was founded in 2014 by Vishal Garg, building a fully digital mortgage origination platform intended to replace much of the traditional mortgage process, which has historically involved extensive paperwork, in-person meetings with loan officers, and lengthy underwriting timelines, with a faster, more automated online experience where borrowers can get pre-approved, upload documents, and track their loan status entirely through a web and mobile interface. The company grew rapidly during the historically low interest rate environment and refinancing boom of the early 2020s, expanding beyond mortgages into adjacent products including title insurance and homeowners insurance, aiming to build a broader digital homeownership platform rather than only a mortgage lender. Better.com attracted significant attention, not always positive, for a series of controversies involving its founder and CEO Vishal Garg, most notably a December 2021 incident in which Garg laid off around 900 employees over a single Zoom call shortly before the holidays, a moment that was widely covered in the media and became a symbol of poor management practices during the broader tech layoff wave that followed the end of the pandemic-era mortgage refinancing boom. The company had also been preparing to go public via a SPAC merger with a special purpose acquisition company backed by SoftBank, a deal that was repeatedly delayed and restructured amid the controversies and the broader collapse in mortgage origination volume as interest rates rose sharply starting in 2022, before eventually completing in 2023 at a valuation far below what had originally been proposed. Better.com has continued to operate as a public company following the SPAC merger, navigating a much smaller mortgage origination market than the one it scaled rapidly within, and has raised substantial capital over its history from investors including SoftBank's Vision Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Goldman Sachs.
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