Staircase to mortgage-heaven? | Mortgage Professional America

“It’s never easy to raise a sum like that,” Kalamchi mused. “We’ve been very lucky just to have some supporters since the beginning. Charles (Birnbaum – partner at Bessemer Venture Partners) and Bessemer got involved earlier than they typically do because Charles has other investments with a similar API aggregation model that are just really powerful businesses for the ecosystem.”

Staircase’s platform appears to have provided investors with compelling evidence that its product is not only worthy but “a game changer”, according to Kalamchi.

“We absorb complexity,” he said. “We do the translation, and we do integrations literally in one or five days.”

Kalamchi said he drew inspiration from the Google Translate model to find the solution to a complex IT problem. Google discovered early on that it would take them three years just to translate two languages and that, if they continued using the same method, it would take them a further 10,000 years to complete the task.

To solve the conundrum, it created a “central sort of neutral language”, based on English. “(It was) the source language to that central language. With Staircase, we do the same thing,” he explained. “We have a clean sort of central staircase, mortgage model language. The way we do it is you can interact with our platform in your own language. So, if you speak English, it looks like the world speaks English. If you speak Spanish, it looks like the world speaks Spanish.