Ralo Raises $2.9M in Seed Funding from Y Combinator

The round saw the Backers included Y Combinator, Manresa Ventures, Pack Ventures and angels including Charles Ferguson and Ryan Frazier.

The company plans to use the funds to grow its product offerings and expand into new markets this year.

Ralo uses bank-grade encryption trusted by major financial institutions and does not store Social Security numbers or other sensitive personal data. It also ensures that private information is never shared with AI models.

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The company closed its first loans in March 2026 and is currently growing revenue rapidly, doubling month over month. Ralo is licensed in California, Colorado, and Texas, and plans to expand into more states in the coming months.

Ralo uses AI to automate the entire process with a focus on the customer. It compares offers from multiple lenders to find the best deal.

By removing intermediaries like loan officers, processors, and underwriters, Ralo avoids high commission costs. This allows it to offer rates more than half a point lower than the national average, saving customers tens of thousands of dollars.

“The U.S. residential mortgage market is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity that AI will almost certainly transform,” said Jackson Gates, Managing Partner at Manresa Ventures. “What impresses me most about Helly and Arjun is that they have the design instincts and technical ability to rethink the entire consumer experience and mortgage origination process from the ground up. Ralo is already helping consumers save tens of thousands of dollars while making the process dramatically simpler and less stressful.”

“My co-founder and I experienced firsthand how painful getting a mortgage can be,” said Ralo’s Lalwani. It felt like we were back in the 90s: emailing PDFs, chasing paperwork, and bouncing between loan officers just to compare rates. We realized AI could reinvent the process and make mortgages faster, less expensive and much less stressful for borrowers.”

“The mortgage industry hides fees, inflates rates, and tells you cheaper means worse. It's a lie. Ralo runs on AI loan officers and AI processors that get smarter with every loan, while everyone else is still drowning in paperwork and billing you for it. The result is mortgages that are actually affordable, actually transparent, actually straightforward. Every dollar of that efficiency belongs to the borrower,” said Shah. “The industry’s overhead was never a feature, it was a tax.”

About Ralo

Founded in 2025 by Arjun Lalwani and Helly Shah, Ralo is an AI-native mortgage broker that uses artificial intelligence to find the best deals and remove costly intermediaries. This helps deliver mortgage rates more than half a point below the national average.

The platform automates the manual work usually handled by loan officers, manages communication with lenders, and brings transparency to the mortgage process, making it easier and more affordable for consumers. On average, Ralo is 4x cheaper than traditional brokers, closes mortgages 3x faster, and delivers a more efficient experience through its AI loan officer.

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