Better Home & Finance (NASDAQ:BETR) founder and CEO Vishal Garg said the digital mortgage lender and platform provider is leaning into a more “agent-driven, autonomous future,” outlining how Better’s product stack and partnership strategy are intended to accelerate loan volume growth while moving the business toward profitability.
Origin story and mission
Garg, who said he has worked in consumer fintech for 26 years, described founding Better.com after a personal experience buying a home in 2014, when he said a Citibank mortgage took more than 60 days to complete. At the time, he said he was trading mortgage-backed securities and could “price any loan” in seconds, which led him to question why origination took so long.
Volume targets, partnerships, and a path to EBITDA breakeven
Discussing recent results and forward-looking targets, Garg said Better reached a low point in 2023 after rising rates, with funded volume at about $3 billion. Since then, he said the company has doubled its revenue run rate and volume run rate, exiting December at a roughly $6 billion annualized volume run rate, or about $500 million per month.
Garg said Better was confident it could double the business over the coming three to four months and reach $1 billion in monthly loan volume “later in May,” citing the launch of “Credit Karma Home Loans powered by Better” and other partnerships. He added that as the company scales, Better expects to reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven by the end of Q3 2026.
He also referenced:
- A partnership with a “top three fintech” that has adopted Better’s platform for HELOCs and home equity loans, with mortgage as a future expansion.
- A newly signed partnership with one of the top five mortgage companies in the U.S., which he said has thousands of loan officers across hundreds of branches—an arrangement he expects to ramp more slowly due to training and change management needs.
Tinman platform and “outcome as a service” pricing
Garg described Better’s Tinman platform as an integrated system that combines functions typically handled by multiple legacy mortgage systems—such as CRM, point-of-sale, loan origination, pricing, eligibility, compliance, and document generation—into one workflow intermediated by “agentic AI.” He said the broader industry often relies on older software where only one person can work in a loan file at a time.
He emphasized Tinman’s commercial model, saying it is sold “by the outcome” rather than by seat licenses or hours, with clients paying per transaction at the time of funding. Garg said this aligns costs with revenue events and improves adoption.
He cited examples of Tinman adoption across large industry players, including Finance of America in reverse mortgages, Credit Karma as a fintech platform, and an unnamed partner he called “the largest retail lender in the country.” Garg also referenced metrics he said were disclosed in Better’s quarterly earnings deck: a retail lender team that joined the platform increased annualized volume from $1.5 billion to $3.2 billion in 12 months, increased funded loans per month from two to four, and reduced operating costs by 30% after six months fully loaded on Tinman.
OpenAI/ChatGPT integration and faster decisioning
Garg said Better has partnered with OpenAI for nearly three years and recently launched a Tinman AI app inside ChatGPT. He described the initiative as a way to reduce onboarding friction for partners: instead of learning Tinman over six weeks to three months, he said partner staff could use a ChatGPT Enterprise instance with the Tinman app and interact via conversation.
He also said Better launched what he described as “the first credit decisioning engine inside ChatGPT,” enabling banks, fintechs, and mortgage lenders to make decisions “in as little as 47 seconds” compared with what he called an industry average of 21 days. Garg said Better received inbound interest quickly, including demos requested by more than 50 banks and mortgage brokers globally over a two-week period, including “two of the three largest banks in the country,” as well as large fintechs.
Looking further ahead, Garg said Better believes it can eventually support consumer mortgage and home equity experiences inside ChatGPT, and he described an approach where personally identifiable information is transmitted directly to Better and “never sits in the LLMs.”
D2C strategy, international changes, and risks
Garg said Better’s direct-to-consumer (D2C) business demonstrated strong product attributes—rates, speed, and ease of use—but historically lacked distribution and brand awareness. He said Better.com originated a meaningful share of pre-approvals, but claimed most approvals are “taken away” by local mortgage brokers tied to local realtors. He said Better has shifted from fighting brokers and retail lenders to collaborating with them, including transferring customers to local lenders and sharing in revenue.
He said D2C remains a “lab” to improve the value proposition and demonstrate what is possible with AI. Garg added that if rates fall into the “five and change or four and change” range, D2C could potentially scale materially, as it did from 2019 to 2021. He also said Better improved D2C contribution margin from zero to about $2,000 per loan, which he characterized as roughly a 28% net contribution margin rate.
On international operations, Garg said Better has been exiting its U.K. businesses after an earlier global expansion push. He said three of four U.K. businesses have already been exited, and he expects “north of $50 million” in capital release over the next six to nine months.
Asked about risks, Garg cited potential changes in regulation and leadership over time, the possibility of a recession reducing home purchase demand, and the need to continue improving Better’s AI. He noted that while a recession could mute purchase activity, a significant rate decline could lift refinance and home equity volumes.
In discussing AI agents, Garg argued that if AI agents begin handling mortgage shopping and refinancing, Better could benefit because it is oriented around price, speed, and utility rather than brand relationships. He said Better has an MCP server that enables an AI agent to transact “every aspect” of a mortgage or home equity transaction—something he said differentiates Better among thousands of U.S. mortgage companies.
About Better Home & Finance (NASDAQ:BETR)
Better Home & Finance Holding Co engages in the provision of comprehensive homeownership services. It offers mortgage loans, real estate agent services, and title and homeowner’s insurance services. The company was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in New York, NY.
