About Sonar

We build AI for lending. Then we run our own loans on it.

Sonar is a lending AI company. We have been building the platform for more than eight years, and we are now launching the full AI suite.

Why we built Sonar

We started by building Simplist, a digital mortgage company that was named Best Digital Mortgage Company in the 2021 FinTech Breakthrough Awards. Running it taught us the problem firsthand. We hired processors in the refi booms and managed the layoffs when volume crashed. We tried every workflow tool that promised to fix mortgage operations. None of them changed the basic math: when volume doubles, headcount doubles.

AI finally changes that. Not tools that assist people, but software that does the work. So we built it for ourselves first, and everything we sell has been run on real loans before a customer ever sees it.

8+ years

building the platform, one loan at a time

[10,000s]

of real loans run through it [confirm count]

Every type

of mortgage, from conventional to non-QM and HELOCs

A note from our founders

We came at lending from two sides. One of us spent years at First Republic, a bank known for getting mortgages right. The other came out of Lazard and a career in finance, looking at lenders from the outside and wondering why the operations never got cheaper.

Before Sonar, our leadership team had already originated billions of dollars in loans. We knew what good looked like. We also knew how much of the work was reading documents, chasing paper and checking boxes.

So more than eight years ago we started building. First a digital mortgage company, Simplist, so that we would feel every problem ourselves. Then the platform underneath it, loan by loan, until it could run an operation end to end.

Today that platform has been tested on [tens of thousands of] real loans and every type of mortgage, and we are launching the full AI suite on top of it.

We sell it two ways because lenders want two different things. Some want better tools for their own team. Others want the result, and would rather not run a back office at all. We are set up for both, and we use everything we build ourselves.

If you run a lending business and any of this sounds familiar, we would like to talk.

Anthony Sherman and Chris de la Motte

Co-founders and Co-CEOs