Jonathan Chao

The product is the point

In September 2023, Jonathan Chao did the thing most founders treat as unthinkable. He handed over the CEO chair at the company he co-founded - and went back to building the product. Daniel Wallace, a former Figure leader, took the top job. Chao became Chief Product Officer. For a person who had spent a decade learning that the title rarely ships the feature, it was less a demotion than a return to the thing he actually cared about.

Haven, the company he started in 2020 with Nipun Kant and Aditya Acharya, is aimed at a corner of finance most people would rather not think about: mortgage servicing. Not the splashy moment of getting a loan, but the thirty quiet years afterward - the monthly statement, the escrow, the property tax bill that lands like a surprise. There are roughly 53 million American households carrying a mortgage. Haven's bet is that the servicer who talks to those homeowners every month is sitting on the most underused relationship in finance.

The pitch is almost contrarian in its simplicity. Mortgage servicing has historically been a cost center - a place to minimize call volume and move on. Chao's premise flips it. Treat the homeowner like a consumer, give them a product worth opening, and the servicer's portfolio of mortgage servicing rights becomes more valuable, not less. The numbers Haven cites are the kind that make industry veterans look twice: consumer-grade design driving up to 88% opt-in and 70% engagement, in an industry where most borrowers can't name their servicer.

Where the empathy comes from

Chao doesn't talk about homeownership as an abstraction. Growing up in an immigrant family, he watched his parents struggle to make sense of the costs of owning a home - the line items, the deadlines, the jargon that assumed you already knew the rules. That experience is the load-bearing wall of Haven. The platform exists to be the thing his parents never had: a guide rather than a gatekeeper.

The unlikely path

Chao's resume reads like a tour of consumer fintech's translation layer - the people whose job is to make money feel less hostile. He studied applied mathematics at UC Berkeley and began his working life as an actuary, the discipline of pricing risk one table at a time. It is an origin that explains a lot: a builder who is comfortable with probability but kept asking who, exactly, was on the other end of the model.

Around 2011 he joined Credit Karma early - by some accounts the 20th employee - and rode it up. Product Manager, then Group Product Manager by 2015, then Director of Product Management by 2017, where he also ran the personal loans business as general manager and pushed its revenue. In 2018 he left for Plaid, leading product for the Consumer Group and building the teams behind consumer-facing surfaces. Credit Karma taught him scale. Plaid taught him plumbing. Haven was where he put the two together and pointed them at the mortgage.

Betting on voice and the years after closing

Under Chao's product leadership, Haven has leaned into the parts of servicing that feel most human and most repetitive at once. In October 2024 the company partnered with the AI startup Kastle to bring AI-powered voice agents into the servicing experience - 24/7, low-wait, conversational support meant to answer the questions that otherwise sit in a phone queue. The product surface keeps widening: property-tax monitoring, a Haven Wallet, tools that treat the relationship as something that compounds over decades rather than ending at the closing table.

In 2024, HousingWire named him a Rising Star, its list of leaders 40 and under shaping mortgage, real estate and fintech. By 2025 he was on stage in the publication's HousingStack series alongside Total Expert's Joe Welu, demonstrating what consumer-grade UX and voice AI actually look like when a borrower has a question and a real answer arrives in real time.

The throughline is consistent. Chao keeps showing up wherever consumer finance needs a translator - and he keeps choosing the room where the product gets built over the room where the title gets announced.