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Elio Mortgage emerged from stealth on September 29, 2026, with $5.1M in pre-seed funding. Motive Partners and Social Leverage led the round, and Insight Partners co-founder and Managing Director Jeff Horing invested as an angel. The money will go toward product development, expanding licensed mortgage operations nationwide, and recruiting loan officers.
CEO Oren Michaely is a former Microsoft engineer who later served as director of AI at Motive Partners. Co-founder Arad Lev Ari has a background in real estate investing and investment banking at KKR and Deutsche Bank.
Elio's central choice is to run a licensed mortgage business rather than sell software to existing lenders. It builds on a proprietary agentic AI platform, which lets its engineers and loan officers develop the technology inside the origination process. Mortgage technology has traditionally addressed separate stages, such as applications, document management, and underwriting, leaving people to coordinate across systems. Elio aims to automate more of that coordination, lower origination costs, and let loan officers handle more borrowers while keeping human judgment. Michaely says the industry has digitized individual processes but still relies on people to stitch them together.
The company is also building Elio Embedded. It lets financial advisors, real estate agents, home builders, and institutional owners of single-family rental portfolios offer mortgage services without building their own origination infrastructure. Elio acts as the underlying mortgage operation while the partner keeps the customer relationship.
Social Leverage's Matt Ober said the model lets businesses with trusted customer relationships make mortgage financing an extension of their services. Motive's Harsh Govil framed Elio as part of a shift from task-level software to AI that coordinates work across financial services organizations.
