She left a senior engineering job at Affirm to chase a stubborn question: why is it so hard to buy property with people you trust? Her answer is Fractional, the platform turning strangers into co-owners for a few thousand dollars a piece.
Stella Han did not set out to reinvent real estate. She set out to buy some of it. Before Fractional existed, she and her friend Carlos Trevino pooled their own money and bought land in Mexico, then built a small retail storefront on it. The plan was to learn the business by living it. What they learned, mostly, was that the business is a swamp of paperwork.
The property was fine. The process was not. To sort out something as basic as who got to make which decisions, the two of them ended up paying roughly $750 an hour for legal counsel. Two friends, one plot of land, and a lawyer's meter running like a taxi in traffic. Han filed the experience away, the way engineers do, as a bug report on the entire category.
She had the résumé to do something about it. Han studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon, graduating in 2018, and went straight into fintech at Affirm, the buy-now-pay-later company. There she built and scaled prequalification and payment-processing systems, and led integrations with Walmart and Shopify, two of Affirm's largest partnerships. It was serious infrastructure work, done young.
Affirm is also where she met Trevino. The two bonded over an unlikely shared fact: both had grown up in real estate families. By day they worked on making retail purchases painless, one installment at a time. On the side, they kept bumping into how painful real estate ownership still was. The mission at work and the frustration outside it eventually collided.
Real estate is the classic wealth builder, the thing everyone's uncle swears by. It is also, for most people, out of reach. You need a large down payment, a tolerance for landlord duties, and usually the willingness to do it alone. Han's insight was that the barrier is not just money. It is coordination. People would happily buy property together if the mechanics of doing so were not so miserable.
So Fractional set out to make co-ownership feel inclusive, collaborative, and hassle-free. On the platform, a group of friends, or a group of complete strangers, can pool money and buy an investment property together. Fractional handles the machinery underneath: the LLC, the shared decision-making, the K-1s and tax filings, the property management. Buy-ins can start in the low thousands of dollars rather than the tens of thousands. The landlord becomes a small committee, and the committee has software.
It is a very engineer-brained solution to a very human problem. Everything Han found infuriating about the Mexico land deal, the ambiguity, the lawyer bills, the who-decides-what, got turned into product surface. If two friends with a lawyer on retainer is the worst case, Fractional is the attempt to make the best case boringly simple.
The idea attracted an eclectic cap table. Fractional went through Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch and raised a $5.5 million seed round at a $30 million valuation, led by venture firm CRV. The round also drew in names you would not normally find on a proptech term sheet: actor Will Smith and NBA star Kevin Durant, alongside Goodwater Capital, Unusual Ventures, Global Founders Capital, On Deck, Contrary Capital, and Soma Capital.
By the time that funding was announced in late 2021, more than 400 people had already co-invested across 95 properties during the beta. In November 2024, Fractional raised a $15 million Series A led by Fifth Wall, the real estate technology firm, to grow its user base, ship new products, and push into more American cities. A company that started as a side project about a storefront in Mexico now has an institutional real estate investor writing the checks.
Han goes by "hellastellah" online, a small nod to Bay Area slang, which is about as much personal branding as she seems interested in. Her story is refreshingly free of the usual founder mythology. There is no lightning-bolt origin, no grand manifesto. There is a smart engineer who got annoyed by a real problem, had the technical chops to model it, and decided the annoyance was worth a decade of her life.
That is the through-line from Affirm to Fractional. At Affirm she made it easier to pay for things over time. At Fractional she is making it easier to own things together over time. Both are, at heart, the same bet: that the friction people accept as normal is actually just a product waiting to be built. Real estate has always been a solo grind or a family affair. Han is wagering it can be a group project instead, and that plenty of people have been waiting for permission to join in.
Real estate is a classic way to build wealth. The buying part is anything but simple.
Notable backers
She is the co-founder and CEO of Fractional, a San Francisco startup that lets people co-own investment real estate together. She is a Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate and former senior software engineer at Affirm.
Fractional is a social platform for fractional real estate ownership. It lets friends and strangers pool money to buy and manage investment properties, handling the LLC setup, decision-making, and paperwork, with buy-ins that can start in the low thousands of dollars.
A $5.5M seed round led by CRV in 2021, and a $15M Series A led by Fifth Wall in November 2024, plus backing from Y Combinator, Will Smith, Kevin Durant, and others.
She was a senior software engineer at Affirm, where she built payment and prequalification systems and led integrations with Walmart and Shopify. She studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Han and co-founder Carlos Trevino, who met at Affirm and both grew up in real estate families, bought land in Mexico together to learn the process. The friction of co-owning it, including expensive legal fees, inspired them to build Fractional.
