Flat Branch and Tidalwave Launch AI Mortgage App

- Tidalwave, founded in 2023 by Diane Yu, Jack Deng, and Cheng Li, has raised a total of $24 million. Its recent $22 million Series A was led by Permanent Capital with participation from D.R. Horton, the largest homebuilder in the U.S., and Engineering Capital. - The company's agentic AI platform automates the end-to-end mortgage process, including verification and underwriting, by integrating with services like Plaid, Argyle, and Truv for real-time data, and directly with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for instant underwriting checks. - In its initial weeks of implementation with Flat Branch, the new app, called "Flat Branch Home," converted 90% of consumer applications into submissions, a metric that surpasses industry averages where application abandonment is common. - Other early adopters of Tidalwave's platform include prominent mortgage lenders such as NEXA Lending, First Colony Mortgage, and Mortgage Solutions. - The implementation of digital automation tools, like those provided by Tidalwave, can reduce mortgage origination costs for lenders by approximately $1,500 per loan. - A key competitor in the consumer-facing real estate AI space is Ridley, which has raised $6.4 million in seed funding. Ridley's platform uses agentic AI to guide homeowners through the for-sale-by-owner process, providing tools for pricing, listing creation, and legal support. - The core architecture of an AI agent, like the one powering the Tidalwave app, consists of three main components: the Large Language Model (LLM) that acts as the "brain," a set of "tools" to interact with external systems and APIs, and a "reasoning loop" that enables the agent to solve problems and execute tasks. - In the broader financial services industry, agentic AI is being applied to a range of use cases beyond mortgage processing, including loan origination, credit risk evaluation, KYC compliance, and wealth advisory services.