Elio Mortgage has emerged from stealth with $5.1 million in pre-seed funding, but the company isn't taking the usual route of building an artificial intelligence product and trying to sell it to mortgage lenders.
It bought a mortgage brokerage instead.
Elio acquired Florida-based Hightide Mortgage, giving the startup a functioning operation with eight LOs and licenses in two states. Since January, the operation has grown to roughly 40 LOs, expanded to 22 states, and reached about $200 million in trailing 12-month origination volume.
Hightide's website now tells visitors that the company is Elio, with the "same team" and "same loan officers."
The strategy puts a different spin on the wave of AI tools entering mortgage origination. Instead of inserting another piece of software into an existing lender's technology stack, Elio is attempting to build the mortgage operation itself around AI agents — and use that infrastructure to give loan officers more time to sell.
Building The Technology Inside The Brokerage
Elio was founded by CEO Oren Michaely, a former Microsoft engineer and director of AI at Motive Partners, and COO Arad Lev Ari, whose background includes KKR and Deutsche Bank.
They are joined by Chief Brokerage Officer Steven Carey, who founded Hightide Mortgage.
Rather than develop the technology separately and then introduce it to lenders, Elio's engineers and LOs work inside the same mortgage operation, allowing the company to build and test its platform against actual origination workflows.
"Bringing loan officers and engineers together gives us a tight feedback loop to build, test, and refine the technology around the realities of originating a mortgage," Michaely said.
Michaely has publicly argued that this fragmentation is one reason AI investment has yet to produce a dramatic change in mortgage origination costs. In an August column, he argued that automating individual tasks without redesigning the workflow leaves much of the industry's existing operating structure intact.
Elio is effectively putting that argument to the test inside its own brokerage.
Its platform uses a unified data model and AI agents for work including prequalification administration, document processing, income calculations, conditions resolution, and borrower communication, according to Motive Partners, which invested in the company.
The goal isn't to remove the LO from the transaction.
Elio's recruiting materials draw a deliberate line between the two jobs: AI agents monitor files, prepare follow-ups, surface potential blockers, and coordinate tasks, while LOs retain responsibility for relationships, advice, judgment, and approval.
"AI agents prepare → People review and approve," the recruiting site says.
That human-review model distinguishes Elio's proposition from fully autonomous origination.
AI Becomes Part Of The Recruiting Pitch
The recruiting site pitches what it calls “retail-level support” paired with “broker-level economics,” advertising 200 basis points paid to the LO with no Hightide platform fees or deductions. Its earnings calculator notes that individual examples are illustrative and not compensation quotes.
Technology is part of the package.
Elio's platform connects the POS, LOS, CRM, pricing, and guidelines rather than operating as a standalone AI application, according to the recruiting material. The company says agents can monitor each file and prepare the next action around the clock while leaving consequential decisions with the LO.
Hightide also advertises in-house processing, marketing support, pricing and guideline tools, and LOA support for producers reaching $15 million in volume.
The pitch boils down to something recruiters have been selling for years — spend less time managing files and more time originating — but Elio is betting that AI changes the economics behind that promise.
NMP's review of Modex data provides another snapshot of that expansion. As of Sept. 30, Modex identified 31 licensed loan officers associated with Elio Mortgage, including 24 producing LOs, along with licenses across 22 states.
A Second Distribution Play
The brokerage isn't Elio's only route to borrowers.
Through Elio Embedded, the company plans to provide mortgage capabilities for registered investment advisers, real estate agents, home builders, and institutional owners of single-family rental properties.
The idea is to allow businesses that already have customer relationships and potential mortgage demand to offer financing without building their own mortgage operations. Both the embedded business and Elio's brokerage run on the same underlying AI platform.
The $5.1 million round was led by Motive Partners and Social Leverage, with Insight Partners co-founder and managing director Jeff Horing participating as an angel investor. The capital will go toward product development, national licensing expansion, and LO recruiting.
Motive sees the approach as analogous to technology-driven changes in real estate brokerage. The investor specifically points to Compass and Real Brokerage as examples of companies that incorporated technology into the operating model rather than simply selling software to incumbent firms.
That makes Elio's next phase more consequential than another mortgage AI product launch.
The company is effectively testing whether AI can become part of the economics of being an originator — combining broker compensation and lender choice with the operational support traditionally associated with a retail platform.
