“Can a technology-first, commission-free mortgage platform systematically reduce the cost and time of home lending to capture durable share of the US residential mortgage market?”
Founded in 2016 by Vishal Garg after a personal experience with the slow traditional mortgage process, Better.com set out to fully digitize and de-commission the home-lending workflow. The company rode the COVID-19 refinance boom to rapid scale, reaching a $6B valuation in 2021. Post-boom, the company faced significant headwinds including publicized mass layoffs and a turbulent SPAC process, forcing a refocus on cost-efficient, technology-led mortgage origination. The embedded finance story centers on deploying Stripe as a PSP layer and operating an in-house digital mortgage product rather than building a diversified financial services stack.
Better processes payments through Stripe.
The Embedded Finance Index 2026 maps 2 layers in Better's stack: Payments / PSP (Stripe); Lending (Digital mortgage origination, Home purchase loans and Refinance loans).
Better was founded by Vishal Garg and is founded in 2016, headquartered in New York, NY, USA.
Better has raised $900M+ in total (latest round: SoftBank investment, April 2021; valuation: $6B post-money (2021)).
Get a read on where your own stack stands against Better and the rest of its category — what they built versus bought, which providers they use, and where the gaps in your own strategy and competitive set actually are.