One of Calgary's Newest Startups: An Interview with the Co-Founder of Purelend.Ai
We sat down with Lucas Scheer, co-founder of Purelend.Ai, Calgary's newest company revolutionizing the banking industry.
Welcome to the 60 Second Founder series by Tech Thursday, a new newsletter segment that highlights founders and co-founders in Calgary and the companies they’re building here in the city.
In Episode 1, Tech Thursday sat down with Lucas Scheer, a senior tech executive, startup advisor, and founding member of Purelend.Ai.
After years of being an executive at Neo financial, including leading the mortgage team there, Lucas Scheer embarked on a journey from Tuktoyaktuk (the northern most part of continental North America), to the southern-most point in Argentina on his motorcycle.
Upon the conclusion of the trip, Lucas embarked on a different journey: teaming up with former colleagues and friends to tackle the issue of old technology in the banking industry.
Purelend.Ai was born out of a feeling that everyone can resonate with: the desire to create something impactful with people you love working with.
“We just wanted to work with people that we loved.”
That drive led Lucas Scheer, Wayne Kainu, and Sebastian Hiscock to team up, having previously worked together at Neo Financial, and tackle the state of processing loans, starting with mortgage brokerages and the processes that limit document verification.
Currently, applicants will send their documents to a broker, who will spend days going through and verifying each one. Once the broker has verified everything, those documents are then sent to the lender, who also spends days verifying the documents. This process and the friction it caused between the brokers and the lenders led to the statement that encompasses Purelend’s goal:
“There’s no reason we can’t do this better.”
Purelend’s early days came after Lucas embarked on a trip of a lifetime: riding his motorcycle from the northern-most point of North America and swimming in the Arctic Ocean, with the goal of reaching the southern-most point in Argentina.
Between camping on the side of highways, to navigating tiny towns at the base of a volcano in South America, the trip spanned months, over 40,000 kilometers, and treacherous highway after treacherous highway (hear more about the journey from Lucas himself here).
Why?
“Because later isn’t guaranteed”
With Purelend’s official rollout scheduled for this week, the process has been fast, checking in at roughly two months to launch - something that was of utmost importance to the Purelend team:
“We didn’t want to wait around and spend a bunch of time building, not knowing if people were actually going to use it.
So only a few weeks into the process, we built and launched this prototype with a few people that already kind of trust us, that we could trust to give us a lot of candid feedback.
Based on that, we were able to build this first version of the full product.”
While the initial jitters for the prototype were present, Scheer feels more at-ease with the upcoming launch knowing that it works, people are excited, and the waitlist continues to grow.
While the launch is geared up for this week, the document verification process is fairly standard across the board, both provincially and internationally, providing Purelend’s pathway to scaling fairly straightforward; although the team is laser focused on the impending launch.
For now? As Lucas put it:
“Right now, this is the most fun part of building a company. You’re working with friends, building something cool. Your potential customers are excited. You're on cloud nine.”
The early feedback from users to this point has been extremely positive, but the team expects, as with any initial launch, to stack learning experiences as more users come in. When asked about his biggest learning experience with Purelend up to this point, Scheer kept with that theme:
“Ask me again in a couple months, the hard part is coming”.
Thank you for reading Volume I of Tech Thursday’s ‘60 Second Founder’. If you know of a founder in Calgary that’s building in tech, make sure to reach out to Tech Thursday on our Instagram!
Very cool! Glad to see calgary being hit by the wave of FinTech, I think it’s gonna change the world for the better!