Credit Karma Moves Towards Home Mortgages with Acquisition

Credit Karma acquired Approved last week, according to a blog post written by Approved CEO and founder Andy Taylor. Approved is a platform that simplifies and facilitates the process of obtaining home mortgage loans.

“When we left Redfin three years ago to tackle the often painful and tedious process of getting a home loan, nearly everyone in the real estate space was focused on the front end: home search, finding agents and seeing homes,” Taylor wrote.  “The industry had lost sight of the fact that a majority of lenders still used fax machines as a regular part of doing business.”

Taylor and co-founder and CTO of Approved, Navtej Sadhal, set out to modernize the process with a number of features including the DocVision Camera which scans documents using the customer’s smartphone.

Both Approved founders had worked at Redfin, a real estate search and brokerage services company, before creating Approved. Taylor and Sadhal will now work for Credit Karma in San Francisco, as Mortgage General Manager and Staff Engineer, respectively.

Founded in 2015, Approved was based in San Diego and originated nearly $5 billion in loans, according to Taylor’s post. It also has reduced document exchange time by 50%, according to the company website.

“Working with Credit Karma gives us the resources and immediate scale to accelerate our mission-driven work, reaching significantly more homebuyers than we could have imagined when we started,” Taylor wrote of Credit Karma’s acquisition of Approved.

Credit Karma, which provides free credit scores and reports, has 80 million members.

Todd Stone was a reporter for deBanked.