PALO ALTO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / December 10, 2025 / Flair Labs, a Palo Alto-based SaaS startup building what it calls the world's most graceful voice AI, today announced a $4 million seed round led by Leo Capital. The investment comes after the company emerged from Y Combinator and reflects its rapid traction among mortgage lenders adopting AI "digital workers" to transform customer engagement, drive down operational costs, and accelerate loan origination.
Founders of Flair Labs
Flair's AI voice assistants are designed to handle the thousands of routine conversations that bog down mortgage companies every day-qualification calls, rate checks, follow-ups, appointment scheduling, document reminders, verification workflows, and more. By offloading this communication overhead, mortgage teams are converting more customers while giving loan officers time back to focus on higher-value advisory work.
"Flair stands out in many ways," said Shwetank Verma, General Partner at Leo Capital. "They've worked alongside some of the largest mortgage brokerages to streamline communications using graceful voice AI at a fraction of the cost. Instead of wasting time on laborious, routine customer consultations, top teams are using Flair to focus on higher-leverage tasks that drive business growth."
The company's impact is already measurable. West Capital Lending, a top-100 loan originator by volume, has automated hundreds of thousands of calls monthly with Flair's digital workers - resulting in a 180% increase in booked appointments with customers exploring home loans.
The round includes participation from Y Combinator, Rebellion Ventures, Ignite Ventures, and several prominent vertical-SaaS operators and angel investors.
Built by founders who understand AI - and the mortgage bottleneck
Flair Labs was founded by Samir Sen, Chao-Ping Wu, and Haocheng Zhang, alumni of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon who met at national hackathons and later worked on engineering teams at Apple and Microsoft. With deep backgrounds in applied AI and natural language processing, the trio saw a glaring opportunity: while AI has transformed consumer experiences, the mortgage ecosystem has lagged - slowed by legacy systems, manual workflows, and expensive human bottlenecks.
"The mortgage industry runs on conversations - thousands of them, every single day - but most of those conversations don't require a human expert," said Zhang, co-founder and CTO. "AI has been capable of handling these interactions for years; the industry just hasn't had a solution built specifically for its compliance, tone, data, and customer expectations. We knew we could build something that felt natural, trustworthy, and genuinely helpful."
For Flair, "graceful" AI isn't just a tagline - it's a design philosophy. The team has spent months fine-tuning voice models to sound calm, humanlike, and precise, with deep mortgage-domain understanding.
"Consumers deserve a better experience when they're making the biggest financial decision of their lives," said Chao-Ping, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer. "When someone wants to check their eligibility, schedule a call, understand next steps, or simply get a question answered at 9pm, they shouldn't have to wait until the next business day. Digital workers let lenders be available instantly, 24/7, without sacrificing quality or empathy."
A new operating system for customer engagement in lending
Flair's platform now supports end-to-end communication flows in lending, including:
Lead qualification
Speed-to-lead outreach
Re-engagement and recapture
Employment and income verification
Refinance campaigns
"Our goal is not to replace loan officers - it's to eliminate the friction that prevents them from scaling," added Wu. "Digital workers take care of the repetitive work. Humans handle judgment, empathy, and expertise."
The company plans to use the new capital to expand its engineering team, deepen its mortgage-compliance stack, and continue developing advanced voice AI that can execute increasingly complex workflows across lending and financial services.
The big picture
As mortgage teams face rising acquisition costs, unpredictable demand cycles, and tightening margins, Flair is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer that lets lenders do more with less - and deliver a dramatically better customer experience in the process.
"The next wave of mortgage innovation won't be flashy - it will be invisible. Every task that slows down origination today will quietly self-resolve in the background," said Sen. "That's the future we're building."
To learn more about Flair Labs, visit https://www.flairlabs.ai/
Contact Information:
Name: Samir Sen
Business: Flair Labs, Inc.
Address: 1522 Western Ave STE 24177 Seattle, WA 98101
Email: founders@flairlabs.ai
Website: https://www.flairlabs.ai/
SOURCE: Flair Labs, Inc.
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