Monday 23 January 2017 4:59 am

Startup taking the hassle out of mortgages, Habito, has landed millions in new funding

A property technology startup which helps find homebuyers the best deal on their mortgage online via a chatbot has raised a new multi-million pound round of funding to support its growth, City A.M can exclusively reveal.

Habito, already backed by seed capital from the entrepreneurs behind Transferwise and Funding Circle, has landed a further £5.5m of cash led by Silicon Valley's Ribbit Capital.

Existing investor Mosaic Ventures also participated in the series A round bringing the total cash behind the startup, which automates and therefore simplifies the mortgage application process, to £8.2m.

Transferwise founder Taavet Hinrikus, Funding Circle's Samir Desai and Russian Billionaire Yuri Milner who also boasts investments in the UK's Citymapper, China's Xiaomi and the startup space of ex-government tech advisor Rohan Silva, Second Home, are among early stage backers of the tech company.

In nine months, Habito has already helped 20,000 customers with £50m worth of mortgages and founder and chief executive Daniel Hegarty told CityAM the new backing was "validation that what we're doing makes sense" and revealed it is growing at a rate of 30 per cent a month.

The investment will go towards growing the 25 strong team "fairly significantly" and largely in engineering, to help role out new product features. That includes a switching service similar to those which already exist for utilities or mobile contracts, alerting homeowners when it 's time to switch to a better mortgage deal automatically, Hegarty said, as well as approving mortgages in real-time. Much of this will come from development of its machine learning capabilities.

While there have already been several successful startups in the proptech space, FCA-authorised Habito is one of several fintech startups to crop up hoping to solve the hassle of financing around buying a home.