Fintech Mast Raises £1.2M to Accelerate Buildout of its Cloud-Native Mortgage Origination Infrastructure
LONDON, United Kingdom — Following a successful product launch in November 2021, Mast Technologies ("Mast") has raised £1.2M to accelerate the development of its cloud-native mortgage origination platform and to support rollout for new clients. The round is led by Antler VC, with additional participation of prominent global angel investors including founders of Booking.com, Monzo, ThirdFort, and senior executives from Pivotal, VMWare, Jones Lang Lasalle, Airwallex and many more.
Mortgage origination is a slow and costly process. Borrowers frequently wait up to sixty days to receive an offer on their mortgage application, causing uncertainty and failed transactions. Lenders, brokers and borrowers waste significant time in the origination process making clarifications, adding missing data and checking documents. The rigid systems used by many lenders only exacerbate this problem and remove opportunities for agile, tactical changes.
Mast has built a unique cloud-native mortgage origination platform that resolves these problems and has helped process over £50m of mortgage applications since inception. By providing real-time feedback on the quality of applications upfront, Mast ensures the data and documents used in an application meet the lender’s requirements to prevent the cumbersome back and forth process seen today. The new funding will allow Mast to continue the development of its fully customisable underwriting workflow tools and Policy Engine to help automate more of the origination journey.
To support the complete origination journey, Mast acts as a golden source of lending criteria with a secure risk and control framework built around it, has secure two-way messaging built-in and encrypted note taking.
Mast’s open infrastructure allows lenders to leverage other technologies as part of the origination journey, permitting applications to be submitted and reviewed faster, plus the free movement of data in and out of the platform to other parties in the lending ecosystem.
Jed Rose, Partner at Antler: “As one of the world’s most active early-stage investors, we are typically the first money in and continue our support with investments up to Series C. We invest in only 1% of more than 50,000 founders we meet annually and currently have 40+ companies in our UK portfolio. We were impressed early on by the drive of Mast’s co-founders, who instantly stood out. After backing the team with their first investment, we are thrilled to lead this next round as well. The broader participation of other great investors is further validation that there is significant support around applying deep industry experience and new technologies to solve this decades-old problem in lending.”
Mast co-founder and CEO Joy Abisaab commented on the announcement, saying: "We're very excited to announce this milestone and are very grateful to those joining us on our journey who trust our ambitions. Since launching with our first client, we have significantly helped improve conversion rates and time to offer timelines. We are building the platform with direct and close feedback from lenders and brokers. This funding will enable us to accelerate the product roadmap and engineering velocity considerably. Over the last 15 years we’ve seen dramatic innovation across the financial landscape, but mortgage lending technology has lagged behind the improvements made to consumer services. Now is the time to bring lending technology up to speed".
Mast is expanding its Engineering and Product team.
Join Mast @ usemast.com/careers
About Mast
Founded in 2020, Mast is building cloud-native mortgage origination infrastructure that allows lenders to operate more efficiently, react faster to changing market conditions, and focus on offering the best service possible. Mast aims to provide greater clarity and certainty for borrowers, by partnering with lenders and enabling them to make better decisions, faster, taking the stress out of the process.
About Antler
Antler is the world’s most active early-stage investor, supporting hundreds of technology startups and thousands of entrepreneurs across six continents or leading entrepreneurial hubs such as New York, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, Seoul and Sydney.
Antler is changing the way that early-stage investments are made at scale and making entrepreneurship more accessible to exceptional talent anywhere. Antler is helping to professionalize early-stage investing, by bringing new capital, a large global community of co-founders and a broad set of industry expertise to the earliest stages from the outset to support fast-growing companies.