The word “mortgage” can be a scary word; usually being associated with other scary words such as debt, and expenses. There’s another alarming word that comes to mind when we talk about a mortgage, and that’s frustration. The frustration you experience when you try to apply for a mortgage, and then there’s the long turnaround time. All this makes the experience of procuring a mortgage quite harrowing. However, UK-based Molo aims to change this.
It aims to make this process fast and transparent, and it has raised £266M (approx €292.6M).
Molo Raises €292.6M
Molo claims to be UK’s first, fully-digital mortgage lender. It has raised a further debt and equity funding of £266M (approx €292.6M) in its Series A round. The capital raise comes after the first tranche of £10M (approx €11M) for the Series A round that closed in January 2020.
The investment was led by global financial services firm Macquarie Group (Macquarie) and Patron Capital, a pan-European institutional investor focused on property-backed investments. The equity round was led by Yabeo, an international VC firm, and supported by existing shareholders Andenes Investments, GPS Ventures, among others. SpecFin Capital advised Molo.
The raised capital will be used to accelerate the company’s growth through additional online lending and investment in its proprietary technology and new product propositions, with an aim to achieve Molo’s vision of making homeownership easier for everyone.
About Molo
London-based Molo was founded in 2017 by Francesca Carlesi and Leo Grunstein. It was launched in the UK at the end of 2018 as the first fully digital (the first player to offer mortgages underwritten fully online), direct to consumer, mortgage lender. It leverages a proprietary tech platform to deliver simpler and faster online, paperless, buy-to-let mortgages.
Molo uses a unique combination of automated decisioning and human expertise, that integrates with its partners’ systems including Experian (a consumer credit reporting company) and Rightmove (an online real estate portal) to deliver faster and more transparent mortgage loans directly to its customers.
Its vision is to make homeownership easier for everyone and this includes plans to offer residential mortgages in the future, in addition, to buy to let.
According to the company, it has experienced significantly higher volumes of online mortgage applications post COVID-19, which point to the growing popularity of digital lending and the convenience of its digital model. Molo claims that in August and September alone, its pipeline of buy to let mortgage applications exceeded £500M (approx €550M).
Image credits: Molo
