Sela AI closed $21 million in combined Seed and Series A funding, led by Costanoa, to scale its mortgage focused voice AI agents that already drive over $1 billion in monthly loan originations.
Sela, the San Francisco-based voice AI platform specialized for mortgage lending, has raised a total of $21 million across its Seed and Series A rounds. The financing was led by Costanoa, with participation from Emergence Capital.
Sela builds purpose built AI voice agents that handle borrower outreach, qualification, education, objection handling, multi channel follow-up (voice, text, email), and warm transfers to human loan officers. Agents integrate with leading mortgage CRMs and lead providers, achieve sub-second speed to lead, maintain conversation context across interactions, and operate with TCPA compliance and SOC 2 Type II certification. The system is designed around mortgage specific workflows for both consumer direct (refinance, purchase, aged leads, inbound) and retail (rate alerts, credit inquiries, portfolio reviews) channels. Success is measured by borrowers reached, productive conversations, and loans closed rather than talk time.
In roughly 18–20 months since founding in mid 2024, Sela has:
- Crossed $10 million in annualized run-rate revenue (with some internal references citing progress toward or around $13 million ARR).
- Enabled loan officers to originate more than $1 billion in new mortgages per month.
- Secured production deployments with 6 of the 10 largest independent U.S. mortgage banks.
- Scaled to handling hundreds of thousands of calls daily (references cite ~600,000).
Head to head results include a 9% lift in lead to lock rates (and >40% higher profit) versus an existing process in a test of more than 10,000 prospects, and a 41% outperformance versus another voice AI solution on lead to lock across 7,000+ leads with a top five mortgage servicer. Agents consistently outperform human call centers in A/B tests on conversion.
Who are Sela’s leaders?
Co-founders are Nate Becker (CEO), previously co-founder of VoiceOps and a data scientist at LinkedIn, and Vahe Tshitoyan (CTO), a former senior machine learning engineer and tech lead at Google with a research background in materials science NLP and related ML work. The company currently has 17 full time employees and plans to expand to approximately 50 over the next year, focusing on product, engineering, and go to market roles. Funding will support this growth plus further development of agents that cover more of the end to end consumer finance journey.
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Costanoa partner David Cheng highlighted that lenders face intense pressure on conversion rates and cost per funded loan, the two core drivers of P&L, and that Sela’s core value proposition is delivering more funded loans. The rapid adoption by major independent mortgage banks within under two years was a key conviction point. Emergence Capital, known for early stage bets that have produced multiple billion dollar outcomes (including companies such as Zoom, Salesforce, Box, and Gusto), participated as well. Costanoa focuses on applied AI, AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, national security, and fintech, typically leading Seed and Series A investments.
The raise arrives amid ongoing margin pressure in mortgage origination, where labor intensive sales processes, high lead costs, and variable conversion remain structural challenges. Sela positions itself as a production grade, mortgage native system that improves both lender economics (higher conversion, lower cost per funded loan) and borrower experience (faster, more consistent, less anxiety inducing interactions). By learning optimal sales behaviors across tens of millions of calls and applying them uniformly, the agents aim to close the performance gap between top human performers and the broader team.
Near term use of capital centers on team scaling and expanding agent capabilities deeper into the consumer finance workflow. With strong early enterprise penetration among large independent lenders, demonstrated lift in key conversion metrics, and a clear vertical focus, Sela is positioned as a market leader in voice AI for mortgage sales at a time when AI agents are increasingly expected to handle more of the origination process.
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