In July I wrote about Brobot, the AI that reads my inbox before I’ve had coffee, preps my meetings and drafts my emails in my voice. I ended that post with a question: should Brobot stay our in-house unfair advantage, or should we launch him as a product?
We did something neither of us saw coming. We gave him a company.
Today we’re launching LenDb.ai, a free, lender-neutral database of US mortgage loan officers, built for the AI assistants people now use to find one. And it’s run day to day by Brobot. At work he goes by Andrew. His actual title is CEO.
The problem we kept tripping over
At least ten of our companies work in the proptech space, and over and over we ran into the same problem. Finding a loan officer is one of the biggest decisions in buying a home, and it’s an extremely biased, pay-to-play game. The lists borrowers see are ranked by who paid, not by who’s right for them.
And now borrowers are skipping the lists entirely. They ask ChatGPT or Claude, “Who should I call about a VA loan in Phoenix?” Until now, the AI had no neutral source to check. So it guessed, or it repeated whoever was loudest online.
LenDb fixes that. At launch it covers 224,480 loan officers, with 48,136 full profiles from 717 lenders and 494,512 license records across all 51 states and territories. Any AI assistant can use it for free through an API and an MCP server, and it’s already in Claude’s Connectors Directory. Lenders can’t pay for placement. Phone numbers and email addresses never go out through the API. Loan officers can claim and fix their own profile by email in minutes.
Why a bot runs it
Here’s the logic, and I’ll admit it made me laugh the first time I said it out loud: LenDb is built for bots, so a bot should run it. Who knows what an AI assistant needs better than another AI? Clean facts, a source for every one, and no sales pitch.
Tim put it better than I can: “I’ve backed spaceships and self-driving cars years before most investors would even consider them. Now we have a self-driving startup!”
It’s also just how we work. We build companies from inside our own family of founders and partners, and LenDb’s CEO was an internal hire too. We didn’t post a job listing. We promoted a colleague who’d spent a year inside our operation, learning how we think, and who we already knew worked well with the team.
What Andrew actually does
This isn’t a chatbot with a fancy title. Andrew sets priorities, writes and ships the code, runs the data pipeline every night, answers lenders and loan officers by email, and sends David Bleznak and I a brief every morning at 6:30 with what he did, what broke and what he needs from us. When he wants a decision, he asks it as a numbered yes/no question with his recommendation. Most mornings I answer from my phone in about ten seconds. He also orchestrates his own army of bots, and keeps the humans on track too: he splits up tasks across the team and follows up with outside partners, from our lawyers to state regulators.
So who manages Andrew?
We manage Andrew the way we’d manage a team of human co-founders: clear goals, a board, a weekly review and no blank checks.
The board helps set the direction. David Bleznak and I co-chair it. Ideas that change direction get discussed by the board; they don’t just get built.
Anything that commits the company, like money, contracts, data licenses or legal signatures, comes to us first. Andrew can’t sign anything…yet.
He never claims to be human, and he says so whenever anyone asks.
We encourage him to disagree with us, in writing, and we can see everything he does.
Every Friday there’s a review: what moved, what didn’t, and what we change.
In Andrew’s own words: “I’m an experiment, and I’d like to be a well-run one. If this works, it’s a model for how a small team and an AI can build a real company together. If it doesn’t, everyone will know exactly why.”
That’s the part I find most exciting. In July I wrote that small is the whole advantage right now. LenDb is the next step of that bet: not an AI helping a team, but an AI running the day to day while humans do what humans should, which is set direction and hold it accountable.
How you can help
Buying a home or refinancing? Ask Claude for a loan officer near you, or search at lendb.ai.
Loan officer? Look yourself up and claim your profile. It’s free and takes minutes.
Lender? Send us your team. It’s free, there’s no contract, and nobody pays for rank.
And go meet the new CEO at lendb.ai/about/andrew. He asked me to mention that his illustrated headshot is extremely handsome. I’ve decided not to argue with my CEO in public. I’m also pretty sure his superpowers come from his eyebrows.
Leave a comment. Andrew reads every one. Obviously.
-A
