Building Balerion: It Was Never Just About AI
When people hear that I’m 27 years old and building an AI company in the mortgage industry, there’s sometimes an assumption that Balerion is a group of young engineers approaching mortgage from the outside. The reality is quite different.
When we started Balerion, we knew how to build AI. What we didn't know yet was how much the people we surrounded ourselves with would shape what we built.
We have taken the time to understand how lenders actually operate, how relationships influence an industry, how people respond to change, and where technology can make a meaningful difference without getting in the way.
That’s changed the way I think about building Balerion. We’re not simply assembling a team around a product. We’re bringing together perspectives that make the product and the company better.
Different perspectives make the product better
That starts with my co-founder and CTO, Vishal Satish. Vishal and I have known each other since our undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, but we came to Balerion with different experiences. His work at Ambi Robotics and Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab focused on a difficult question: How do you build AI that can do more than assist people and reliably take action on their behalf?
That technical foundation has shaped how we think about Balerion from the beginning. We’re not simply applying AI to mortgage. We’re building the architecture required to reason across complex, high-stakes workflows.
As we’ve grown, we’ve intentionally added people who challenge that technical perspective from different angles.
One of the most important decisions we’ve made has been surrounding our engineering team with people who have spent decades inside mortgage. Patrick Harkins and Devin Daly bring different experiences, but together they give us a perspective our engineering team simply can’t replicate.
Patrick has more than 27 years of mortgage experience and has spent decades building relationships with lenders, understanding how their businesses operate, and hearing firsthand where technology has delivered on its promises and where it hasn’t.
Devin brings deep experience across mortgage technology, operations, growth, and client adoption, having worked on both the lender and technology sides of the industry. His career has included leadership roles at companies including Homebridge, Ellie Mae, and True, where his responsibilities have spanned strategy, technology, implementation, customer success, and go-to-market execution.
Together, they help us look beyond what’s technically possible and think about what will actually work inside a lending organization. Does it fit naturally into the workflow? Does it solve a meaningful enough problem? Can it be implemented and adopted successfully? Will it create measurable value for the lender?
Recently, we shared a post about the contrast between Patrick and me: I’m 27 years old, Patrick has 27+ years of mortgage experience, and together we’re Balerion.
The response was much bigger than we expected. I don’t think people connected with it because the numbers happened to match. I think they connected with what it represented.
Innovation doesn’t have to mean replacing decades of industry experience with a new generation of technology. The more interesting opportunity is bringing those two things together.
We’ve continued to build our team around that idea.
Bahador Saket, our Founding Product Lead, brings another important perspective: how sophisticated technology becomes a product people can actually use. His background spans human-computer interaction, data visualization, and product leadership, including helping build and scale an AI platform in healthcare before joining Balerion.
That experience matters in mortgage, where the best technology doesn’t create value if it adds another interface, complicates the workflow, or asks people to change the way they work without a compelling reason. Bahador helps us think about how intelligence should show up at the right moment, in the right context, and in a way that makes the people using it more effective.
More recently, DeLaine Nick joined Balerion to lead our marketing strategy after spending years helping build one of the most recognized brands in mortgage technology at ICE. She brings another perspective we didn’t have internally: how the market sees what we’re building and how the industry responds to new ideas.
That has already challenged us in good ways. Engineers tend to want to explain how something works. DeLaine pushes us to explain why it matters. She challenges us to simplify complex ideas, question how we’re positioning something, and think differently about how we show up in an industry where relationships and trust matter.
That perspective doesn’t sit separately from product or company strategy. It influences both.
The same is true across our team. Engineers see technical possibilities. Product sees how those possibilities become something people can actually use. Mortgage veterans see operational realities and relationships. Marketing sees how the market understands and adopts something new. Our customers see the day-to-day friction we may never fully understand from the outside.
None of those perspectives is enough on its own, and that’s exactly the point.
Listening before building
The other thing I’ve learned is that having the right people around the table only matters if you’re willing to listen to each other and, more importantly, to the people you’re building for.
A lot of attention in technology is placed on having a vision for where an industry is going. I believe strongly in that. But the more time we’ve spent building Balerion, the more convinced I’ve become that you can’t define the future of mortgage technology without spending a lot of time listening to what’s happening inside lending organizations today.
That listening happens everywhere.
It happens in customer conversations, product demonstrations, implementations, conferences, and the informal conversations that happen in between. We pay attention to the questions lenders ask, the frustrations that keep coming up, and the patterns we hear across different organizations.
Patrick’s and Devin’s relationships and experience give us another window into those conversations. Our forward-deployed work puts our technical teams closer to real lender data and workflows. Vishal and Bahador challenge us to translate what we’re learning into technology and product decisions that can work reliably at scale and fit naturally into the way people work. DeLaine challenges us to think about what the market is telling us and whether the way we’re communicating matches how lenders actually think about the problem.
As we spend more time in the market, we’re constantly challenging our own assumptions about what matters most.
Those conversations have a direct impact on what we build. Some confirm what we already believed. Others make us rethink where the human-in-the-loop belongs, change a priority, or look at a problem from an entirely different angle.
Listening isn’t something that happens after product development. Listening is part of product development.
There’s a tendency in AI right now to lead with what’s technically possible. We’re trying to approach it differently. We want to start with what lenders actually need, understand the problem deeply, and then determine how technology can solve it.
That distinction matters, particularly in an industry as complex and relationship-driven as mortgage.
From listening to building
The more conversations we have, the clearer certain patterns become.
Lenders don’t need technology for technology’s sake. They want more confidence in the loan file, fewer manual checks, less rework, and better information earlier in the process. They want technology that fits naturally into their workflows and delivers measurable value without creating another layer of complexity.
Those patterns shape how we think about Mortgage Intelligence.
The opportunity isn’t simply to help people move faster through the work they’re already doing. It’s to rethink what work should need to happen in the first place.
That means surfacing issues earlier. Giving teams better context before underwriting begins. Helping highly skilled people spend less time searching for problems and more time applying the judgment and expertise they were hired for.
Those ideas aren’t being developed in isolation. They’re the result of what we’re hearing, what our team is challenging internally, and what we’re learning as we work alongside lenders.
That cycle of vision, listening, building, and learning is becoming one of the most important parts of how Balerion operates.
The company we’re building
We’re still early in Balerion’s journey, and there’s a tremendous amount we have left to build and learn. But the team we’re assembling has made me even more confident in the opportunity ahead.
Vishal and our engineers bring deep expertise in AI and machine learning. Bahador brings the product perspective that helps turn that technology into experiences that fit naturally into how people work. Patrick, Devin, and the mortgage veterans around us bring decades of experience, relationships, and an understanding of how lending technology actually works inside an organization. DeLaine is pushing us to think differently about our market, our brand, and how we communicate a new category. Our customers continue to challenge all of us by bringing real problems, real workflows, and real expectations to the table.
For me, that’s what Mortgage Intelligence is really about.
It’s not simply the technology we’re building. It’s the combination of technology, product thinking, industry experience, relationships, market perspective, and constant learning that makes the technology useful in the first place.
The future of mortgage won’t be built by AI experts working in isolation, and it won’t be built by doing things the way they’ve always been done. It will come from bringing those perspectives together, listening carefully to the people doing the work, and continuing to build alongside them.
That’s the kind of company we’re building at Balerion.
And we’re just getting started.
