Mortgage as an employee benefit? Kleiner Perkins leads $23.5M Series A for Multiply Mortgage

After hitting record lows at the start of the pandemic, mortgage rates began to climb in 2022 and haven’t come down significantly since. With 30-year mortgage rates hovering at over 6.5% today (they were as low as 2.49% in 2020!), buying a home is simply not that attainable for many people. One Denver-based startup is out to help change that. Founded in 2022, Multiply Mortgage originally set out to help tech employees access some of the value of their equity compensation while their employers were still private. But interestingly, the founders, Michael White and Gautam Gupta — alums of Square, Opendoor, DoorDash, and Uber — observed that most of the employees were using their liquidity offerings for home purchases and related expenses. “Homeownership has become increasingly out of reach for many Americans, and we don’t expect interest rates to fall to the levels we saw in 2020 ever again,” White told TechCrunch. So in July 2024, the startup altered course to offer a mortgage benef ... Read full article.