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“They might be thinking, ‘OK, I might be living in an apartment now, but in the next few years I’m going to meet someone and/or have a child and I want to unlock the investment that is a home,'” he told TechCrunch. Lower’s typical customer is the millennial and now Gen Z who’s aspiring to own their first home, according to Snyder. “We tried to design the app flow in a way where you can get as far along as you can in the application but if you want, at any point in time, to talk or chat with someone, we’re available,” Snyder added. In launching the direct-to-consumer digital lending brand, the company was working to make the homebuying process more “ digital, transparent and easier for consumers to access,” Snyder said.Īt the same time, the company didn’t want to lose the human touch. Also, we all grew up in the mortgage industry, so we saw firsthand the size of the market, but also how broken it was, so we wanted to change it.”

That’s been one of our pillars, so that’s what we’ve done. “We’ve had a view going back to the start of the company that we wanted to run it profitably. “Our history is maybe a little atypical of fintech companies today,” he told TechCrunch. Over the years, Lower has funded billions of dollars in loans and notched an impressive $300 million in revenue in 2020 after doubling revenue every year, according to Snyder. Not pictured: Robert Tyson Image credit: Lower Standing (L to R): Co-founders Mike Baynes, Chris Miller Sitting (L to R): Co-founders Dan Snyder, Grayson Hanes This year, it launched the Lower mobile app with a savings account. In 2018, the company launched the website for Lower, its direct-to-consumer digital lending brand with the mission of making its platform a one-stop shop where consumers can go online to save for a home, obtain or refinance a mortgage and get insurance through its marketplace. The company launched with Homeside, its retail brand that Snyder describes as “a tech-leveraged retail mortgage bank” that works with realtors and builders, among others. Snyder co-founded Lower in 2014 with the goal of making the home-buying process simpler for consumers. There were other unnamed participants in the round, but Accel provided the “majority” of the investment, according to Lower.

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The combination of a company built in a nontraditional region across the globe and a bootstrapped company reminds us of companies we have partnered with for a large Series A.” “Like Galileo, Lower will be one of the most successful bootstrapped fintech companies globally. “We were immediately intrigued because Ohio-based Lower echoes both of these themes,” said Accel partner John Locke, who led the firm’s investment in Lower and is taking a seat on the company’s board as part of the investment. The two companies have a few things in common besides being profitable: they were both bootstrapped for years before taking institutional capital and both have headquarters outside of Silicon Valley. In fact, Galileo founder Clay Wilkes introduced the VC firm to Dan Snyder, Lower’s founder and CEO. Silicon Valley-based Accel has a history of backing profitable, bootstrapped companies, having also led large Series A rounds for the likes of 1Password, Atlassian, Qualtrics, Webflow, Tenable and Galileo (which went on to be acquired by SoFi). Lower is also something that is kind of rare these days in the startup world: profitable.

The financing also marks the previously bootstrapped Lower’s first external round of funding in its seven-year history. First off, it’s a large Series A even by today’s standards. This round is notable for a number of reasons.

Lower, an Ohio-based home finance platform, announced today it has raised $100 million in a Series A funding round led by Accel.

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