The first money David Hyman and Sebastian Watkins ever put into a business was borrowed from their parents. Hyman has described the pair, who met at their first job out of university, as people who never really wanted to work for someone else.
That is about all the public record gives of their early lives. Where they grew up and studied is not documented in what we found, so the story rests on what they built. Their first business together ended in an exit with LivingSocial, as a 2023 Fintech Chatter podcast episode recounted. That meant that when they turned to home loans in 2013, they already knew what it felt like to sell a company.
What almost nobody outside the industry saw was who ended up on the share register.
With Martin Lam and Mark Kalajzich they started Lendi. The target was enormous and unglamorous: the mortgage market, dominated by four banks. Lendi set out to make borrowing feel like an app, while keeping a human broker in the loop. The podcast notes describe the early years as bootstrapping, raising capital and what they call blitz scaling.
What almost nobody outside the industry saw was who ended up on the share register. Banks that Lendi was meant to challenge, including CBA, ANZ and Macquarie, became shareholders.
The turn came in 2021. Lendi merged with Aussie Home Loans, the broker franchise owned by CBA, and brought in Domain Home Loans, too. The ACCC approved it in March and the deal closed in early May. Hyman became group CEO, with Watkins as chief operating officer. The combined business included more than 1,000 Aussie brokers, and in the first full year it recorded A$33.6 billion of settlements.
There is a price to being swallowed by the system you set out to beat. The start-up that sold itself as an alternative now sits inside the network it once chased, and its founders' identity as outsiders has shifted. By the time of its tenth anniversary in 2023, Lendi described itself as Australia's fifth-largest mortgage distributor, handling around A$30 billion of home loans a year.
For first-time founders, the interesting detail is the very first cheque. Two friends who borrowed from their parents ended up running a platform that banks wanted to own part of. Small family money, spent well, can buy a very long runway.