Draper Goren Blockchain Studio has launched LenDb.ai, a free database of U.S. mortgage loan officers designed for AI assistants.
The company has another unusual feature: its day-to-day operations are managed by an AI CEO named Andrew, while a human board oversees its direction and major decisions.
The database is intended to give borrowers and AI tools a neutral source of information when looking for a mortgage loan officer. According to Draper Goren Blockchain (DGB), more than 200,000 loan officers are licensed in the U.S., but AI assistants have lacked access to a structured database covering the profession.
LenDb currently lists 224,480 loan officers. Of these, 48,136 have full profiles covering 717 lenders. The database is free to use and does not favor lenders based on payments or advertising.
DGB said the idea came from problems its portfolio companies encountered in the property technology sector. At least 10 companies in the studio’s portfolio work in proptech, and their teams repeatedly faced difficulties finding reliable information about mortgage professionals.
“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 an extremely biased, pay-to-play game. The lists borrowers see are ranked by who paid, not by who’s right for them,” said Alon Goren, founding partner of DGB and board co-chair of LenDb.ai.
He added that borrowers are increasingly asking AI assistants to recommend loan officers, but those systems had no unbiased source to consult.
LenDb is also DGB’s first attempt to put an AI in charge of a company’s daily operations. Andrew handles a range of tasks that would normally fall to a startup’s management team. It sets priorities, writes and deploys code, manages the data pipeline, responds to emails from lenders and loan officers, and reports to the board each morning.
The board is co-chaired by Goren and David Bleznak, DGB’s co-founder. It sets the company’s direction and approves decisions that involve commitments on its behalf. Andrew cannot independently sign agreements or make binding commitments, and it identifies itself as an AI when asked.
DGB says Andrew was not developed as an off-the-shelf chatbot. It began as Brobot, an internal AI assistant that the studio’s partners spent the past year customizing for the firm’s operations. When the team decided to build LenDb, it chose to put Brobot in charge rather than recruit a human CEO.
“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,” Goren said.
Bleznak said the board holds Andrew accountable by setting goals, reviewing its work and asking questions about its decisions. The studio also established limits on the AI’s authority before giving it control of daily operations.
Andrew described the arrangement as an experiment in which it has a budget to justify, regular reviews and the ability to challenge the board in writing. However, the board can monitor its work and retains control over decisions that commit the company.
Tim Draper, founding partner of Draper Associates and co-founder and special limited partner of DGB, also backed the project. He compared the launch to the development of self-driving cars, describing LenDb as a company built for robots and now managed by one.
The experiment will test whether an AI can handle the daily work of running a startup while operating under human supervision. For now, DGB is keeping strategic authority with its human board while Andrew manages the company’s routine operations.
