homebuying
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Kevin Bennett and the price of a little clarity
He helped build Caribou around a question many drivers never thought to ask. Now Kevin Bennett is taking the same concern for everyday financial decisions into the homebuying business.
Sofia Vyshnevska and the Follow-Up Nobody Had Time to Make
After six accelerator rejections, three pivots and one pandemic-timed launch, the Ukrainian-born Jome co-founder has a precise idea about AI: let it chase the cold leads, so people can handle the warm moments.
Greg Schwartz Left Zillow to Fix the Most Anxious Hour in Homebuying
After 12 years building Zillow's marketplace, Schwartz traded scale for a blank sheet of paper. At Tomo, his wager is that a mortgage can feel less like paperwork with a deadline and more like a service designed for an actual person.
Jome
Jome (formerly NewHomesMate) is an AI-powered real estate marketplace focused on new construction homes. It aggregates dispersed listings from home builders into one searchable platform - covering roughly 90% of available new construction inventory across 16 U.S. cities - and pairs buyers with certified experts trained specifically on the new-build process. Founded by Ukrainian entrepreneurs Dan Hnatkovskyy and Sofia Vyshnevska, the Austin-based company has helped over 100,000 buyers search for homes and generated more than $250M in sales for builders including D.R. Horton, Lennar and PulteGroup.
Nora Apsel
Nora Apsel is the co-founder and CEO of Morty, the New York-based online mortgage marketplace she helped build from a Techstars idea in 2016 into a full-stack platform that has facilitated over $2 billion in home loans across 45+ states. She joined as Morty's founding engineer, rose to COO, and took the CEO seat in 2020. A former nonprofit worker who retooled as a software engineer at Meetup and Flurry, she is driven by using product and technology to democratize access to financial products and make one of life's most opaque transactions - getting a mortgage - transparent and buyer-first.