Former Caribou founder launches Further, a fintech company focused on helping people buy homes

Buying a home has always been difficult. You need to determine how much money to put down and how that down payment will affect your monthly mortgage bill. Then there are closing costs and fees. Kevin Bennett launched Further to try and make the financial process easier to navigate — especially for first-time buyers.

Further is a financial technology platform that takes users through the financial side of buying a home. The company’s first product, launching Friday, is a calculator that shows what people can afford, what their monthly mortgage payments and closing costs might look like, among other metrics based on real-time interest rates.

Unlike other mortgage calculators found on Zillow and LendingTree, Further provides users with more than numbers. It tells users how easy it will be for them to find a loan based on their financial situation, whether they should wait to buy, or whether they should look for certain types of loans based on their financial profile, among other things.

The platform is currently free to use. The company plans to monetize when it releases more product developments, but declined to share details.

“A generation ago, our parents bought a $200,000 house with a 20% mortgage, and it was very easy,” Bennett said. “There was one type of mortgage and that’s what you did and it’s just more complicated. There are many types of mortgages. There are many consequences. Houses are a lot more expensive now, so it’s a lot more difficult and it’s a much more important financial decision.”

Bennett found himself looking for something new to work on last year after leaving Caribou, the auto loan refinancing startup he co-founded in 2016 and served as CEO. He knew he wanted to do something else mission-oriented, but he didn’t know where.

He began studying real estate, a category he said he had always been passionate about. The fact that his entire family works in real estate also helped. He started talking to people who had bought a home in the past two years and found many common problems: people didn’t understand the process and relied on homemade spreadsheets to figure out what they could afford.

Bennett also had personal experience: He bought and sold a townhouse in his 20s and was surprised to learn he had a $30,000 loss despite selling the house for the original purchase price. This is because he missed out on certain home improvements that could have increased the home’s value.

“You won’t be able to hit the cancel button when you buy this house,” Bennett said. “It was felt that there was a gap in the market. It seemed that everything was much more complicated than a generation ago.”

Last year, he approached his friend Chris Baker, a real estate expert and former EasyKnock product manager, about his idea. The couple quickly got to work. Their first conversation took place on November 3, 2023. They decided to work together in January, launched the product in April, and launched an undisclosed seed round in June. Now they are coming out of stealth.

“Our goal is to take care of the complicated jargon and stuff and really make it as easy as possible for you to understand exactly what you need to know, obviously with transparency, but also putting you in the driver’s seat and in control,” he said. .

The company’s previously undisclosed seed round raised $4.1 million from investors including Link Ventures, Vesta Ventures and Fidi Ventures, among others. Bennett said raising the funds wasn’t too difficult, as half the capital the company raised came from investors who backed him when he was at Caribou. Bennett believes his track record as a founder made a big difference. The company deliberately created the cap table to include angel investors with experience in the real estate market, he said.

It seems like Zillow or Redfin are ready to copy that kind of financial information and guidance, especially given that Zillow already offers a mortgage calculator and some advice of its own. But Bennett said he’s not overly concerned about the competition. He said he believes many companies fall either on the proptech side or the fintech side, and are rarely in the middle like Further does, which gives it more weight.

But Further is certainly not the only company that sits between proptech and fintech and targets consumers. A good example is online mortgage startup Better.com, which allows consumers to browse mortgage options or refinance an existing one.

That will likely depend on what Further unveils in its planned Q1 product release, which will include more features and capabilities, but Bennett hasn’t shared too many details yet. Currently, users can use Further to get an idea of ​​what they can afford and what they can expect to pay when buying a home.

“I hope that we can empower people to make the right decisions and plan this really big part of their lives in a way that gives them confidence and calms them down and focuses on what they really want to focus on, which is something like, what they dream of being a homeowner on,” Bennett said.