A San Francisco company building artificial intelligence voice agents to call prospective mortgage borrowers announced Monday it has raised $21 million across seed and Series A rounds, with the latest financing led by Costanoa Ventures.
Sela, incorporated in late 2024, automates the first conversations between lenders and home loan applicants. Six of the country's 10 largest independent mortgage banks now use the platform, the company said, though it declined to name clients or disclose its valuation. Emergence Capital, which led Sela's seed round last year, participated in the Series A alongside Costanoa.
The funding comes as Sela's agents now support more than $1 billion in new mortgages monthly, according to the company. It crossed $10 million in annualized run-rate revenue within 18 months of launch.
How the agents work
The software calls mortgage leads, asks qualifying questions, and transfers warm prospects to licensed loan officers. At one large lender, Sela's agents delivered a 9% improvement in the rate at which leads became funded loans, measured across more than 10,000 prospects. At a top-five mortgage servicer, the startup said its technology converted leads 41% more effectively than a competing voice AI tool across 7,000-plus calls.
"Sela's agents take the best performing sales behaviors, learned across tens of millions of calls, and employ them consistently," co-founder and CEO Nate Becker said in a statement.
The pitch to lenders is straightforward: more funded loans without hiring more salespeople. David Cheng, the Costanoa partner who led the investment, said what convinced his firm was that "Nate and Vahe fundamentally sell the ability to do more funded loans."
The team behind it
Becker previously co-founded VoiceOps, which analyzed sales calls, and worked as a data scientist at LinkedIn. He studied economics at Yale and served as a Fulbright Fellow. His co-founder, CTO Vahe Tshitoyan, came from Google, where he was a senior machine learning engineer and tech lead. Tshitoyan holds a physics PhD from Cambridge.
The company had 17 employees as of the announcement and expects to reach 50 within a year.
Regulatory backdrop
AI voice agents in financial services operate under tighter restrictions following a 2024 FCC ruling that classified AI-generated voices as "prerecorded voice" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. That designation requires prior express consent before placing outbound calls. Sela's website lists SOC 2 Type II certification and TCPA-compliant dialing among its compliance features, though navigating consent requirements remains a persistent challenge for the category.
The broader mortgage market has offered a modest tailwind. The Mortgage Bankers Association projected in late 2025 that single-family originations would climb 8% to $2.2 trillion in 2026, creating demand for tools that help lenders process higher volumes without proportional headcount increases.
Becker said the startup plans to expand what its agents can handle, pushing deeper into the mortgage sales process over the next year. Whether that means post-qualification nurturing or tackling more complex borrower scenarios, he didn't specify. For now, the company appears focused on doing one thing reliably well: making the first call.
