The Adeft Manifesto
For the self-employed, the self-made, and everyone the mortgage system was never built to see.
I'm the co-founder of Adeft, and a self-employed homeowner from a mixed-income household. I know firsthand how hard the mortgage process is for those of us who don't fit neatly into the tidy income box. Thirty million Americans share this problem: 17 million of us who work for ourselves, and another 13 million with messy income like RSUs, 1099s, and investment income. When we try to buy a home or refinance, we're treated as strange and forced to brave a grueling process of endless document requests, opaque lender guidelines, and dizzying loops of calls with CPAs, processors, and loan officers, across a process whose incentives reward friction at every step. It is painful. I've been through it.
I've also been on the other side of the closing table. Prior to my 15 years in tech, I worked as a mortgage loan officer and opened a branch office for a multistate brokerage. The operational burden of a complex-income mortgage was real back then, when we hand-stacked paper files. Not enough has changed in the decades since. Originating a loan today costs nearly $12,000, and much of it traces back to siloed systems, endless manual paper chasing, and years of cruft on broken processes, all held together by humans acting as system integrators. For complex-income borrowers like us, those costs get passed on, one way or another.
Why us
For decades, the math made complex borrowers too expensive to serve honestly. Agentic AI just changed that math, and we built Adeft to act on it.
I've spent the last 15+ years bringing technology products to market that simplify data and complex workflows for both the consumer market and enterprise teams. I built automated systems to run operations for 8K person organizations to deliver high-stakes outcomes. Most recently, I spent more than three years at the bleeding edge of agentic AI, building an AI program manager for the enterprise. I found my co-founder and CTO in Rohit Lavu, one of the most brilliant AI engineers I've ever worked with, who helped Doma become the AI-native title company of the future. Around us we've gathered people who have lived this problem and this industry: Gary Sumner, one of the world's preeminent cloud and security architects, as a key advisor, and Sam Sharp, who has originated more than $2 billion in funded loans, on our advisory board, alongside design partners who together carry five decades of mortgage origination and processing experience.
Few teams have felt this problem from the borrower's chair, worked it from the loan originator's chair, and built at the frontier of the technology that finally solves it. We have.
What we stand for
We stand for the self-employed and the self-built. The small business owner, the founder, the freelancer, the contractor, the household whose income does not arrive in a neat envelope twice a month. We have been quietly priced out, slowed down, and worn out by a mortgage system too old to recognize us. That is both wrong and ridiculous, because we are exactly the people the American dream was meant for.
Adeft exists to serve people like us. We meet borrowers at the moment of confusion with a clear path home. We treat a complicated income not as a red flag but as the normal shape of modern work. We collapse the waiting, the paper chase, and the premium we have always been charged for the crime of being misunderstood. We stand on the borrower's side of the table, beside the CPA and the agent and everyone who already believes in us. The dream of owning a home should never be a nightmare for the people bold enough to build something of their own.
We are starting where the need is greatest, but the principle runs far past any one segment. When you can finally see people clearly and serve them at a fraction of the old cost, you can open the door to far more of them. That is what it means to democratize homeownership. Not lowering the bar. Building toward a mortgage experience designed for clarity, speed, and real personalization, for everyone.
The dream was never the problem. The path to it was.
We are here to clear it.