Better Going Public Following Two-Year Listing Journey

After two years, mortgage lender Better.com will finally go public Thursday (Aug 24).

The company’s Nasdaq listing will happen via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger with Aurora Acquisition Corp., Better — now calling itself “Better Home & Finance” — said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

According to the release, going public will provide better with at least $550 million in added capital, letting it invest in growth, technology and mergers and acquisitions. The company says it is the firest FinTech lender to make $100 billion in loans.

“The process of going public has been as arduous as the process of buying a home in America, perhaps more,” founder Vishal Garg told the Financial Times in an interview Wednesday (Aug 23). “It’s taken, instead of two months, two years.”

As PYMNTS reported earlier this month, Better had announced plans to list in an Aug 11 Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

However, the company first announced its SPAC intentions in May 2021. In the years since then, the company has dealt with layoffs, the resignation of high-level executives and a slowdown in the housing market.

The layoffs are what seem to be mentioned most often in connection with Better, thanks to an incident in 2001 in which Garg laid off 900 employees via Zoom.

As anger over his handling of the firings grew, Garg reportedly sought to defend himself on the networking website Bind, arguing that some of the people laid off had been working “an average of 2 hours a day” while getting paid for a full eight.

“They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills. Get educated.”

Garg has since apologized for both incidents in a message to employees on the company website. He addressed the layoffs again in the Financial Times interview.

“Over the past two years, I’ve spent a lot of time getting leadership training, learning to become a more empathetic leader,” Garg said. “Our foot-faults have made us stronger, and have actually enabled us to become more ready for being a public company.”

As PYMNTS noted last in a profile of the company, Garg founded Better in 2014 following his own frustrating experience with buying a home. He and his wife missed out on their dream property, losing out to a competing buyer following a weeks-long process of paperwork and phone calls.

“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.