Buying a home is stressful, and securing a loan only adds to the stress. Borrowers often face long waits, missed calls, and inconsistent experiences. Some lose interest. Others call the next lender.
Voice AI can greatly improve the experience for homebuyers and lenders. AI Agents contact borrowers immediately, answer questions at any hour, and handle thousands of conversations at once. For an industry built around phone conversations, that changes the experience and the economics.
That is exactly what Sela is building: voice AI agents that help lenders engage, qualify, and convert borrowers.
Sela has the team, technology, and industry focus to make voice AI’s potential real in mortgage, where every conversation can determine whether a prospect becomes a homebuyer.
We led Sela's seed round in 2024 and this month joined Costanoa in the Series A, bringing total funding to $21 million.
Closing the Conversion Gap
Mortgage is a particularly hard market for voice AI.
Every borrower is different. Buying a home is one of the biggest purchases someone will ever make. Conversations involve detailed financial questions and changing circumstances, so agents need to understand the industry, respond naturally, and know when to bring in a licensed loan officer.
Sela was built specifically for that environment. Their agents have learned from tens of millions of mortgage calls to understand the patterns behind successful sales conversations. Sela then continually adapts and improves an agent for each specific lender.
The company focuses on one outcome: helping lenders convert conversations into more funded loans. That is the shift we have been investing behind for two years: AI-native companies that sell the outcome, not the software. Sela doesn't deliver a platform to manage calls; Sela delivers more closed loans.
Delivering outcomes has earned Sela the trust of some of the biggest names in the industry. Six of the ten largest independent mortgage banks now use Sela, giving the team a front-row seat to how voice AI is changing the way lenders reach and work with borrowers.
Built by a Team That Knows the Problem
We first met Nate Becker and Vahe Tshitoyan in 2024. Their backgrounds immediately made sense for what they were building.
Nate had previously co-founded VoiceOps, where he saw the gap in salesperson performance and how difficult it was to replicate the behaviors of the best across a large team. Vahe spent several years as a machine learning engineer and tech lead at Google.
Together, they had the sales experience and technical depth to build AI that could make every conversation better. That combination gave us conviction early, and it has only grown since. Nate, Vahe, and the team are building the voice AI platform for financial services starting with lending, we couldn’t be more bought into their future.
