Mortgage Lender Better.com Plans SPAC Listing

Digital mortgage lender Better.com is set to go public later this month.

The company said in a securities filing Friday (Aug. 11) that it will combine with Aurora Acquisition Corp. a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), and plans to go public on or about Aug. 23.

A report Friday by TechCrunch says that Better.com had initially planned to go public via a $6 billion SPAC in 2021, though that listing was delayed.

According to that report, industry observers had doubts the company would actually list, as the last two years have seen layoffs, the resignation of high-level executives and a slowdown in the housing sector. The company wasn’t deterred by last year’s SPAC drought, TechCrunch notes.

As PYMNTS has written, SPACs were once considered the “it” way to go public, with more than 600 companies listing that way two years ago. But by the end of last year, in certain verticals, listings for SPACs were in single digits.

The planned listing comes amid a historic slump in the startup world, as venture funding dries up for hundreds of companies that had previously enjoyed funding.

A recent Wall Street Journal report says that investors have sharply reduced funding for startups, leading to a 49% drop in tech startup funding for the year ended June 30. This has led to a number of venture-backed firms closing down or downsizing.

Among them are payments processor Plastiq, which filed for bankruptcy in May after an aborted SPAC merger, and the biotech startup Goldfinch Bio, which closed down earlier this year after failing to raise more money.

“In the next 12 months, we’re going to see a lot more companies go out of business,” Jenny Fielding, managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, told the WSJ.

As PYMNTS wrote last year in a profile of the company, Better Mortgage was founded after CEO Vishal Garg’s disappointing homebuying experience, in which he and his wife missed their chance to purchase their dream home after a weekslong odyssey of phone calls and mortgage paperwork sent through the mail.

A competing buyer with money in hand was able to get ahead of Garg and close on the home. The company says this drove Garg to create a mortgage process that allowed borrowers to compete in a seller’s market.

“Technology is now making house hunting and buying more convenient. Post-pandemic, the leaders will be the ones who offer a streamlined, digital home-financing journey,” Ziggy Johnson, the company’s head of financial products, told PYMNTS.