Online mortgage broking startup Habito has raised £5.5 million from Silicon Valley-based Ribbit Capital and existing investor Mosaic Ventures.
The Series A round takes the total raised by the British startup to £8.2 million. Other investors in the two-year-old business include Transferwise CEO Taavet Hinrikus, Funding Circle’s cofounder Samir Desai, and Russian tech billionaire Yuri Milner. Habito is part of a growing “PropTech” scene in London, a subset of fintech – financial technology – that applies tech to the property sector. Habito CEO and founder Dan Hegarty told BI: “Someone in the mortgage market was saying to me the other day they think they’ve seen more innovation in the mortgage industry in the last 12 months than they have in the last 10 years. That’s a general feeling. Fintech has arrived in mortgages.”