Blend Labs Inc

Company Overview

It’s our vision to bring simplicity and transparency to financial services, so every consumer can more easily access the capital they need to reach their financial goals. To realize this vision, we have built a market-leading digital origination platform and suite of products designed to transform consumer banking experiences and streamline workflows for financial providers.

From the moment a consumer starts an application for a loan or a deposit account to the moment they digitally sign the final documents, our platform streamlines the process. Consumers expect modern banking experiences to be as simple as other online shopping experiences. However, financial services firms may not have the resources and in-house software expertise to fulfill consumer demands for intuitive, digital, and easy-to-use products. In addition, most financial providers are burdened by antiquated, inflexible systems and use separate technology stacks for different product lines, making it difficult to drive rapid improvements. Consequently, a broad range of financial providers including banks, credit unions, fintechs, and community and independent mortgage banks have turned to Blend to help them accelerate their digital transformation initiatives and position themselves for future growth.

Our Segments

We operate our business in two segments: Blend Platform and Title.

The Blend Platform segment comprises a suite of products that power the entire origination process from back end workflows to consumer experience. Our growing suite of out-of-the-box products currently enables digital-first consumer journeys for mortgages, home equity loans and lines of credit, vehicle loans, personal loans, credit cards, and deposit accounts. Each of our products is guided by rules and a decisioning framework leveraging an extensive library of pre-defined rules that typically include data collection, verification checks, product selection, pricing, pre-approvals, disclosures delivery, addressing stipulations, and signing closing documents.

The Blend Platform segment also includes Blend Builder, which offers a set of low-code, drag-and-drop design tools, modular components and integrations to allow our customers to create and deploy their own new product offerings. After years of research and development, our platform has evolved to the point where it can now power highly configurable workflows from a pre-built set of components, all while leveraging existing infrastructure.

In 2024, our products within the Blend Platform segment helped financial services firms process nearly $1.2 trillion in loan applications. We bring together an extensive ecosystem of technology, data, and service providers through our software platform, enabling financial services firms to collaborate with third parties to provide best-in-class banking experiences to consumers. As consumers apply for financial products, our digital-first consumer journeys enable them to shop for services providers, such as title and property and casualty insurance products, through our integrated ecosystems that introduce products or services provided by our marketplace partners at the precise moment these products or services are needed. As more consumers use our software platform, we are able to attract a broader range of ecosystem partners, which allows us to deliver more value to consumers and attract more financial services firms as customers. This creates a powerful network effect and differentiator for our business.

Strong customer relationships are the cornerstone of Blend’s success. We establish ourselves as a critical and long-term strategic partner to our customers by powering essential revenue-generating experiences, integrating our software into back office systems, and staffing teams chartered with increasing the value to the customer over time. Blend’s customer relationships grow as our platform is used for a broader range of products. Customers typically complete an initial deployment of one or two products and then add more products over time, building toward a unified consumer experience that supports multi-product journeys.

Our business model is designed to align our growth with our customers’ priorities. In the Blend Platform segment, we offer our products through software-as-a-service agreements, where fees are assessed based on completed transactions, such as a funded loan, new account opening, or closing transaction. We do not charge for abandoned or rejected applications, even though they cause us to incur costs. Completed transaction fees are determined by the number and type of software platform components that are needed to support each product offering. Where applicable, we may also charge partners fixed and/or variable license fees to provide consumers specialized services through our platform, such as providing property and casualty insurance carrier options or settlement services.

Title

The Title segment comprises a suite of title products and services, such as instant title and other title search options, insurance solutions, closing and settlement services, including mobile signing and e-sign capabilities, and various post-closing solutions, such as disbursement and recording handling. In June 2021, Blend acquired a 90.1% interest in Title365, an underwritten title insurance agency engaged in selling title insurance policies and escrow services throughout the United States, from Mr. Cooper Group Inc. (“Mr. Cooper”). Integrating Title365 with our software platform has enabled financial services firms to automate title commitments and streamline communication with consumers and settlement teams.

Together we enable our customers to accelerate the title, settlement, and closing process at scale for mortgages, home equity lines of credit, and home equity loans. In performing title search services, Title365 serves as an agent to place and bind title insurance policies with third-party underwriters. Title365 escrow, closing and settlement services are primarily associated with managing the closing of real estate transactions, including the processing of funds on behalf of the transaction participants, gathering and recording the required closing documents, and providing notary and other real estate or title-related activities. Title365 also provides title services in connection with a borrower default and with the issuance of home equity lines of credit and home equity loans. Title365 became our second reportable segment at the time of acquisition, and was renamed “Title” in 2023.

Changes in Segment Composition

In the first quarter of 2023, we introduced Blend Builder, which gives customers the ability to easily configure or build custom workflows from a prebuilt set of components. In connection with the release of Blend Builder, we changed our reporting segments so that the composition of the Blend Platform segment excludes the digitally-enabled title component and instead the digitally-enabled title component is reported within the Title segment. The comparative prior period amounts have been reclassified to conform to current period presentation.

Recent Developments

The mortgage market is heavily influenced by government policies and overall economic conditions. The real estate environment, including interest rates and the general economic environment, typically impacts the demand for mortgage and mortgage related products. Since 2022, increases in interest rates due to efforts by the Federal Reserve to manage rising inflation, combined with ongoing supply constraints, have resulted in a relative decline in mortgage origination activity, followed by a slight increase in 2024 as compared to 2023, based on the estimates of industry forecasters.

In 2024, we saw a decrease in total mortgage transactions on our software platform compared to 2023, which can be attributed to normal customer churn amidst relatively high interest rates, decreased housing affordability, and uncertain worldwide political and economic conditions.

While industry forecasters estimate that mortgage origination activity increased slightly in 2024 compared to 2023 and currently project that mortgage origination activity will expand throughout 2025, we anticipate a more moderate growth rate in 2025.

Mortgage origination activity depends on many factors, such as changes in the Federal Reserve’s policies or pressures in the macroeconomic environment, all of which are uncertain and out of our control.

We expect the Federal Reserve's decision-making to continue to have impacts on mortgage origination activity. As a large portion of our revenue is driven by mortgage and mortgage-related transaction volumes, changes in mortgage origination volumes have had, and are likely to continue to have, material effects on our business.

Our Solutions

The Blend Platform is designed to power the end-to-end consumer journey for any banking product. From the moment a consumer starts an application for a loan or a deposit account to the moment they digitally sign their final documents, our software platform streamlines the process. Our growing library of composable product and workflow modules remove the limitations of our customers’ existing technology stack, empowering financial services firms to deliver personalized, proactive and simple experiences without sacrificing speed or spend.

Blend is well positioned to benefit from the acceleration in digital transformation investment taking place across the financial services sector. However, we cannot provide assurances about the timing of this anticipated acceleration in digital technology given the macroeconomic environment and its impact on our customers. Our software simplifies complex origination processes that can include hundreds of tasks and require interactions with dozens of external technology, data, and services providers. By automating these tasks and developing pre-built integrations, we help our customers potentially avoid years of expensive in-house software development, in addition to increasing productivity by freeing up resources for other initiatives.

The Blend Platform

Product Offerings

Blend Platform powers the mission-critical interface between financial services firms and consumers. Financial services firms can rapidly deploy our growing number of out-of-the-box, white-labeled products for:

•Mortgage— provides an end-to-end digital mortgage experience from application to close that puts financial services firms at the center of the broader homeownership journey.

•Home Equity— modernizes home equity line of credit and home equity loan origination experiences, delivering higher application submission rates and faster closings.

•Vehicle Loans —enables rapid financing that helps consumers get into their car, boat, recreational vehicle, or powersport vehicle faster.

•Credit Cards— increases application conversions through a configurable product selection experience, streamlined data collection, and instant approvals.

•Personal Loans— drives faster pre-approvals for unsecured and secured personal loans, lines of credit, and overdraft protection lines.

•Deposit Accounts— increases application conversion rates and reduces fraud risk with features that support financial services firms’ Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering policies.

In addition, we have developed a suite of add-on products that we offer to enhance consumers’ journeys to homeownership that are integrated into the end-to-end digital experience. These are:

•Close — streamlines traditional, hybrid, and fully digital closing experiences for mortgages, home equity lines of credit, and home equity loans.

•Income Verification for Mortgage and Home Equity — leverages data integrations with payroll data providers to deliver income reports that are recognized as verified sources of income.

•Title— enables streamlining of the title, settlement, and closing processes at scale for mortgages, home equity lines of credit, and home equity loans.

Blend Builder

Each of our products leverage an extensive library of modular components or module registry that typically include data collection, verification checks, product selection, pricing, pre-approvals, disclosures, addressing stipulations, and signing closing documents. New product offerings can be rapidly created by assembling our modular components into workflows using Blend Builder, which includes tools for:

•Experience design— through low-code design tools, we enable the creation of flexible, consumer-facing forms, user flows for data collection, and automated communications that reflect the brand of each of our customers.

•Process orchestration— through a drag-and-drop editor, we enable the creation of workflows that guide consumers through the process of getting a loan or opening a deposit account.

•Persona-based workspaces— our software platform provides omni-channel user experiences for a broad range of stakeholder personas, including consumers, loan officers, and bankers.

The modular components that make up our products generally fall under the categories of verification, decisioning, and workflow intelligence.

Verification Components

Our verification components automate confirmation tasks that are needed to underwrite a loan or approve the opening of a new deposit account. We have pre-built integrations with providers of technology and services to address requirements for:

•Identity verification— to help financial services firms reduce fraud risk and address compliance requirements for know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) laws, we have integrations that can capture data from government issued identification cards and engage third-party identity verification service providers.

•Income and employment verification— we integrate with payroll data providers to retrieve paystubs, enabling financial services firms to verify an applicant’s income, employment details, and work history.

•Credit— our software platform allows financial services firms to retrieve credit reports from any of the three major credit bureaus and supports both soft and hard credit inquiries.

Decisioning Components

Our decisioning components reduce the need for human intervention by automatically applying business rules throughout an application workflow configured by a financial services firm. Examples include:

•Pre-approvals— we automate the generation of a pre-approval decision when consumers meet specific underwriting criteria established by a financial services firm.

•Cross-selling— we enable financial services firms to present personalized product recommendations to consumers based on data collected in the course of another product application.

•Adverse actions— we automatically generate adverse action notifications for consumers that do not meet minimum credit criteria established by a financial services firm.

Workflow Intelligence Components

Our workflow intelligence components manage data collection and automate tasks throughout the loan origination process. We create application flows with branching logic to streamline initial data collection. Wherever possible, our software eliminates the need for document uploads by integrating with authoritative data sources. We also automate key processing tasks so consumers can begin to address stipulations immediately after a loan application is submitted, including product and pricing selection, automated requests for letters of explanation, and capturing digital signatures on disclosures packages, resulting in faster turn-around times.

APIs and Integrations

Through our open APIs we are able to seamlessly integrate the capabilities of technology, data, and service providers into our software platform. As we develop integrations with new partners, our customers can quickly experience the benefits across their product suite. In addition, financial services firms can use our APIs to develop integrations with the back office systems in their tech stack, creating a unified, agile architecture for powering superior consumer journeys.

The Blend Ecosystem

We bring together an extensive partner ecosystem through our software platform consisting of technology, data, and service providers to deliver best-in-class consumer journeys in highly efficient ways. In addition, we provide our ecosystem partners with a critical distribution channel to reach a universe of more than 100 million consumers at the precise moment they are looking for products and services through the financial services firms we serve.

By providing the software that powers consumer journeys at financial services firms across digital, contact center, and branch channels, we are able to benefit from a substantial volume of high-intent consumer traffic with no incremental acquisition costs. As more financial services firms become Blend customers or deploy additional products through our software platform, the number of consumers using our software platform grows, which attracts more service providers to our ecosystem to serve those consumers. As a result, consumers benefit from more opportunities to save time and money, financial services firms benefit from increased operational efficiency, our partners benefit from increased distribution, and Blend generates additional revenue. We believe this shared success model creates a powerful network effect that will continue to expand our serviceable addressable market over time.

Key elements of our partner ecosystem include:

•Technology Partners— we have built integrations with technology vendors including leading providers of CRM platforms, loan origination systems, core banking systems, document generation systems, and pricing and product engines. These integrations accelerate our deployments and reduce the need for financial services firms to build their own integrations.

•Data Partners— we have partnerships with data services providers that help automate verification checks and reduce the need for consumers to upload documents. These data services providers include credit bureaus, payroll service providers, tax preparers, consumer asset data integrators, employment verification services, and anti-fraud services.

•Marketplace Partners— we leverage strategic partnerships to enable consumer optionality when shopping for certain products and services that can be presented at the precise moment of need during the consumer journey. For example, our strategic partnership with Covered Insurance Solutions, LLC (“Covered”) allows us to integrate their extensive marketplace directly into our mortgage application workflow to accelerate the loan process and provide greater convenience to our mortgage customers due to expanded options and access to additional top-rated national and regional insurance carriers across all 50 states.

•Settlement Services Partners— we onboard settlement agents onto our software platform, enabling us to streamline the settlement and closing process for consumers getting a mortgage, home equity line of credit, or home equity loan.

Key Benefits to Our Customers

We help our customers increase their revenue by powering best-in-class experiences that result in:

•Increased consumer acquisition— our self-service consumer journeys are available at any hour on any device, which contributes to a higher volume of application submissions. In addition, through extensive automation, we enable loan teams to handle a greater volume of loan and deposit account applications.

•Increased consumer conversion— by leveraging the modular components and orchestration capabilities of our platform, financial services firms are able to accelerate the development and delivery of new financial products, ultimately increasing the number of borrowers that complete their loan and deposit account applications.

•Increased consumer satisfaction— we enable consumers to apply for products in minutes on any device, transition seamlessly between channels throughout the origination process, benefit from as much human support as they prefer, and save money on home insurance, title insurance, and automobile purchases.

We also position our customers for long-term success by helping them streamline operations and increase efficiency through:

•Faster innovation cycles— through our software platform, we help financial services firms evolve their business at a faster pace and adapt more quickly to changing market conditions than ever before. Our flexible software platform reduces time to market for new product offerings and eliminates the need to build integrations with an extensive array of technology and data services providers.

•Lower operating costs— we reduce labor costs, hedging costs, and warehouse line costs by automating workflows, shortening loan cycles, and enabling digital closings.

•Lower development costs— our customers benefit from a flexible, white-label software platform that is regularly updated and enhanced by hundreds of engineering, product, and operations specialists.

•Reduced risk of fraud and human errors— we aggregate financial data from multiple sources with consent from consumers, which reduces the need to upload, review, and transcribe documents.

Ultimately, it is our goal to help banks, credit unions, fintechs, and other non-bank lenders proactively improve financial opportunities for consumers. By removing friction, increasing transparency, and bringing greater personalization to consumer acquisition workflows, we see the potential for our software platform to help financial services firms improve the lives of millions of consumers.

What Sets Us Apart

As a leading cloud-based software provider that streamlines the end-to-end consumer journey for mortgages, home equity, consumer loans, and deposit accounts, we leverage our unique capabilities to create distinctive competitive advantages. We believe we are well positioned to serve as a long-term strategic innovation partner and provider of mission-critical software to financial services firms due to the following factors:

•All banking products under one umbrella— we support multi-product shopping experiences and enable consumers to move seamlessly across digital devices, contact centers, and branches throughout the origination process. We also provide additional benefits and incentives for customers to standardize with us across products and channels. Through our software platform, we deliver product updates on a regular basis. Our products are highly complex and require us to have advanced knowledge of modern software development techniques as well as deep industry expertise, including in-depth knowledge of financial services regulations, product offerings, and operational workflows for approving loans and opening accounts. We manage this complexity for our customers, allowing them to focus on driving their business priorities. We continue to invest in research and development to build our products and grow our business.

•Blend Builder —we enable financial services firms to rapidly build and launch new product offerings by leveraging our low-code design tools and an extensive library of modular components purpose-built for loan origination, account opening, and consumer onboarding.

•Expansive partner ecosystem— we partner with more than 130 technology vendors and data service providers and we expect to continue to expand our partner ecosystem. Through our integrations and marketplaces, we enable technology, data, and service providers to collaborate through our software platform and provide superior consumer experiences. By aggregating transaction volume across multiple financial services firms, we are able to negotiate competitive rates for technology and data services we bundle into our products. We believe it would take competitors substantial time, effort, and cost to replicate the scale and benefits of our rapidly growing partner ecosystem.

•Powerful network effects— by providing the software that powers consumer journeys at financial services firms across digital, contact center, and branch channels, we are able to benefit from a substantial volume of high-intent consumer traffic with zero incremental consumer acquisition costs. As more consumers use our software platform to apply for financial services products, we attract more partners to our ecosystem. This allows us to deliver more value to consumers, attract more financial services firms as customers, expand our existing relationships with financial services firms, and generate increased revenue from completed transactions, creating a powerful network effect and differentiator for our business. Our aim is to become the distribution platform of choice for technology, data, and service providers to efficiently reach and serve consumers undertaking financial transactions.

•Agency subsidiaries and licensing— In 2021 we acquired a 90.1% interest in Title365, one of the largest title insurance agencies in the United States, with licenses and partnerships covering all 50 states and the District of Columbia in order to deliver the benefits of our software platform to financial services firms at greater scale. We believe the complexity, cost, and level of effort to duplicate this operational scale is difficult for others to replicate.

•Extensive network of customers— we supply mission-critical software to hundreds of financial services firms, including many of the largest chartered banks and non-bank mortgage lenders in the United States. We also have a proven track record of delivering our products securely, at scale, and in a way that meets their demanding needs. Once deployed, we become deeply embedded in business processes and integrated with back office systems. This enables us to cross-sell additional solutions to our customers. In addition, the scale and diversity of our customer base provides us with extensive data and deep insights that help us strengthen our software platform, enhancing our ability to serve existing and future customers.

Our Growth Strategies

We are working to drive growth through the following strategic priorities, while always maintaining a laser focus on the success of our customers:

•Increase the volume of banking transactions we power for our customers— we believe there is a large market for our software platform in the United States and around the world. By attracting new customers, growing our relationships with existing customers, and helping customers identify additional opportunities for platform deployment, our revenue will grow as we serve additional transaction volume on our platform.

•Continue to invest in new product offerings and increase the value we deliver per banking transaction— we see numerous opportunities to expand our product suite both horizontally and vertically over time in ways that help us increase the volume and type of transactions we power and increase our revenue per banking transaction. Through our deep customer relationships, we gain insights that help us align our roadmap and strategy with the most pressing needs of financial services firms. While we focus today on consumer banking, we believe we can rapidly expand our library of modular components to support commercial banking products. In addition to developing products in-house, we anticipate pursuing selective acquisitions and partnerships to accelerate our growth. We believe we are well-positioned over the long term to become one of the top cloud-based banking platforms responsible for powering end-to-end consumer origination experiences.

•Integrate ecosystem partners into our end-to-end consumer journeys— we receive fixed and/or variable license fees from our integrated marketplace partners for access by consumers to specialized services through our platform, such as providing property and casualty insurance carrier options or settlement services, which helps us increase our revenue per banking transaction. Our integrated shopping experiences can generate additional fees with zero incremental consumer acquisition costs, while enabling financial services firms to deliver better consumer experiences and drive operational efficiency.

Our Customers

Strong customer relationships are a cornerstone of our success. Our customer relationships grow over time as our software platform is used for a broader range of products. Customers typically complete an initial deployment for one or two products and then add more products over time, building toward a unified consumer experience that supports multi-product shopping journeys.

Our customers are currently based in the United States and range in size from the largest banks, credit unions, fintechs, and other non-bank mortgage lenders in the nation to smaller community lenders with less than $1 billion in assets under management.

In 2024, 62.8% of our Blend Platform segment revenue was generated from 23 customers with more than $1 million each in revenue, and 79.4% of our Title segment revenue was generated from 7 customers with more than $1 million each in revenue.

We focus our go-to-market strategy on financial services firms. Our team focuses on building successful long-term customer relationships through a customer-first go-to-market approach. Accounts are staffed with account teams who are responsible for making customers successful using our products, whether it is through technical implementations, organizational change, loan officer enablement, or industry best practices. In order to provide focus and increase our ability to win, we orient our sales workforce around the account size categorized by assets under management, as well as targeting independent mortgage companies. In addition, we have several product specialist roles within our sales workforce for complex products, such as our Blend Close solution. Our internal teams are highly incentivized to go beyond the initial sale and to get accounts live and fully adopted on Blend.

Our products are sold through a direct sales force that continues to manage customer relationships on an ongoing basis post-sale. To create incentives for acquiring new customers and growing existing relationships, compensation is based on a combination of closing new deals and growing transaction volume through our software platform. We use a “land and expand” approach to growing customer relationships, typically completing an initial deployment for one or two products and then adding more products over time.

Our marketing approach focuses on helping the industry understand the value of Blend’s Platform and the suite of products the platform powers. We aim to provide highly personalized experiences for customers and prospects as they engage with Blend and regularly highlight the success of our customers and share the impact Blend has had on their business. Our marketing efforts span across brand awareness, content development, digital marketing, demand generation and supporting our direct sales team. To maintain a high level of engagement with our customers, we participate in leading industry conferences and host our own executive summit called Blend Forum, where we discuss the latest innovations shaping the future of financial services.

Customer Success

We work in close partnership with our customers to help them rapidly deploy our solutions and realize value as quickly as possible from the breadth of our features. By investing deeply in the success of our customers, we seek to build a strong foundation for long-term relationships. Each customer is supported by a team of customer success managers, deployment and integration specialists. Most new customer deployments are completed within three to four months, including integrations to back-end systems. We often discount our deployment services during implementation to allow customers to engage with our platform and incentivize the customer to expand their investment in our products.

We also provide both free and paid training services and maintain an online knowledge base with best practices and training information to help our customers educate loan originators, processors, and support staff. We publish weekly release notes featuring product updates, and we employ dedicated support professionals to answer questions and help customers resolve issues.

Research & Development

Our software platform operates as the interface that connects consumers, financial services firms, and third-party service providers such as property and casualty insurance providers, title agencies, and notaries. We invest substantial resources in research and development to expand our software platform by developing new components, features, and product offerings. Our engineering, product, and design teams build our software platform and products in close partnership with our customers and use focus groups with both customers and consumers to gain a deep understanding of the tasks and workflows we automate. We also analyze the data from millions of applications flowing through our system to understand opportunities for driving further efficiencies and improvements.

We use Agile software development methodologies and automated testing to support continuous product deployment with new code shipping nearly every week. Our modular platform architecture uses microservices and APIs to support the ability for our customers to create unique financial product offerings and consumer journeys.

Competition

The primary competitors for our software platform include point solution vendors, providers of back office software with proprietary digital capabilities, and systems developed internally at financial services firms. We also expect new players to enter the market and existing companies to allocate more resources to develop and market products that compete with ours. We contract with several providers of back-office software for financial services firms in order to integrate our products with their software, and these providers may choose to offer competing software products. We believe we distinguish ourselves from the competition through the breadth of our product offerings, the flexibility of our configurable platform architecture, our ability to support multi-product shopping experiences, the scale of our ecosystem, the service-provider marketplaces integrated into our product offerings, the size and scale of our customer base, and our ability to power superior end-to-end consumer journeys.

Competition in the title insurance industry may impact our business and is intense, particularly with respect to price, service, and expertise. Larger residential mortgage originators also look to the size and financial strength of a title insurance provider. Although we provide title and settlement services to large commercial and residential customers and mortgage originators, there are other title insurance agencies that have substantially greater capital than we do, especially those affiliated with large title insurance underwriters. The size and number of title insurance agencies vary in the geographic areas in which we conduct our title business. Our competitors include other major title brokers, agencies and underwriters, as well as other regional title insurance companies, underwritten title companies, and independent agency operations at the regional and local level. Competition, expansion of existing competitors, or new entrants to the title business could affect our business operations and financial condition.

The principal competitive factors in our industry include:

•product functionality;

•consumer experience;

•employee user experience;

•time to value;

•total cost of ownership;

•flexibility;

•scalability;

•ease of integration;

•level of customer satisfaction;

•ability to innovate rapidly;

•brand awareness; and

•brand reputation.

We believe our product strategy, speed of innovation, and company culture allow us to compete favorably with respect to these factors. However, we expect competition to increase as our competitors invest more in their digital capabilities. Our ability to remain competitive will depend on our ongoing efforts to expand our product capabilities and increase the value we deliver to our customers.

Intellectual Property

We believe that our success depends in part on our ability to protect our core technology and innovations. We rely on a combination of trademark, patent, copyright, and trade secret laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements, contractual restrictions, non-disclosure agreements, intellectual property assignment agreements, and other contractual protections, to establish and protect our intellectual property rights. We control access to our proprietary technology by entering into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with third parties. Though we rely in part upon these legal and contractual protections, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel, creation of new services, features and functionality, and frequent enhancements to our software platform are more essential to establishing and maintaining our technology leadership position. In addition, we use open source software in our services. The terms of various open source licenses have not been interpreted by United States courts, and there is a risk that such licenses could be construed in a manner that imposes unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our services.

As of December 31, 2024, we had one issued patent in the United States. We continue to evaluate our intellectual property portfolio, and may seek patent protection for additional intellectual property developed by us in the future. Additionally, we have registered the term “Blend” in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, and as of December 31, 2024, we had pending trademark applications in the United States. Furthermore, we have and will continue to evaluate, maintain, and register terms and logos that we use, or plan to use, as part of our business. We also have registered domain names that we use in, or are related to our business, most importantly www.blend.com.

We intend to pursue additional intellectual property protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost-effective. Despite our efforts to protect our intellectual property rights, they may not be respected in the future or may be invalidated, circumvented, or challenged. For additional information, see the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property—Failure to adequately protect our intellectual property could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.”

Government Regulation

Our customers and prospective customers are highly regulated and are generally required to comply with stringent regulations in connection with performing business functions that our products and services address. Additionally, we facilitate compliance with these regulatory requirements. While we currently operate our business in an effort to ensure our business itself is not subject to extensive regulation, there is a risk that certain regulations could become applicable to us, including as we expand the functionality of and services offered through our software platform. In addition, we and our partners, vendors, and other service providers must comply with laws and regulatory regimes that apply to us directly and our partners, vendors, and other service providers indirectly, including through certain of our products, as a technology provider to financial services firms, and in areas such as privacy, information security and data protection, and our contractual relationships with our customers.

In particular, certain laws, regulations, and rules our customers are subject to, and we facilitate compliance with, include:

•The Truth in Lending Act, or TILA, and Regulation Z promulgated thereunder, and similar state laws, which require certain disclosures to borrowers regarding the terms and conditions of their loans and credit transactions, and require creditors to comply with certain lending practice restrictions as well as the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule, or TRID, which imposes specific requirements around the collection of information, charging of fees, and disclosure of specific loan terms and costs upon receipt of an application for real property-secured credit;

•The Truth in Savings Act, or TISA, and Regulation DD promulgated thereunder, which impose disclosure requirements with respect to the terms and conditions of deposit accounts;

•The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, or RESPA, and Regulation X promulgated thereunder, which require certain disclosures to be made to the borrower at application, as to the financial services firm’s good faith estimate of loan origination costs, and at closing with respect to the real estate settlement statement, prohibits giving or accepting any fee, kickback or a thing of value for the referral of real estate settlement services or accepting a portion or split of a settlement fee other than for services actually provided for affiliated business relationships, prohibits receiving anything other than a legitimate return on ownership, requiring use of an affiliate, and failing to provide a disclosure of the affiliate relationship;

•The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, or ECOA, and Regulation B promulgated thereunder, and similar state fair lending laws, which prohibit creditors from discouraging or discriminating against credit applicants on the basis of race, color, sex, age, religion, national origin, marital status, the fact that all or part of the applicant’s income derives from any public assistance program or the fact that the applicant has in good faith exercised any right under the federal Consumer Credit Protection Act;

•The Fair Credit Reporting Act, or FCRA, and Regulation V promulgated thereunder, impose certain obligations on consumer reporting agencies, users of consumer reports and those that furnish information to consumer reporting agencies, including obligations relating to obtaining consumer reports, marketing using consumer reports, taking adverse action on the basis of information from consumer reports and protecting the privacy and security of consumer reports and consumer report information;

•Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, or FTC Act, which prohibits unfair and deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, and Section 1031 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which prohibits unfair, deceptive or abusive acts or practices in connection with any consumer financial product or service, and analogous state laws prohibiting unfair, deceptive or abusive acts or practices;

•The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or GLBA, and Regulation P promulgated thereunder, which include limitations on financial services firms’ disclosure of nonpublic personal information about a consumer to nonaffiliated third parties, in certain circumstances requires financial services firms to limit the use and further disclosure of nonpublic personal information by nonaffiliated third parties to whom they disclose such information and requires financial services firms to disclose certain privacy notices and practices with respect to information sharing with affiliated and unaffiliated entities as well as to safeguard personal borrower information, and other laws and regulations relating to privacy and security;

•The Electronic Fund Transfer Act, or EFTA, and Regulation E promulgated thereunder, which provide guidelines and restrictions on the electronic transfer of funds from consumers’ bank accounts, including requirements for overdraft services and a prohibition on a creditor requiring a consumer to repay a credit agreement in preauthorized (recurring) electronic fund transfers and disclosure and authorization requirements in connection with such transfers;

•The Homeowners Protection Act, or HPA, which requires certain disclosures and the cancellation or termination of mortgage insurance once certain equity levels are reached;

•The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, or HMDA, and Regulation C, which require the collection and reporting of loan origination data, including the number of loan applications taken, approved, denied and withdrawn, as well as certain demographic information of the applicant;

•The Fair Housing Act, or FHA, which prohibits discrimination in housing on the basis of race, sex, national origin, and certain other characteristics;

•The Secure and Fair Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing, or the SAFE Act, which imposes state licensing requirements on mortgage loan originators;

•State laws and regulations impose requirements related to unfair or deceptive business practices and consumer protection, as well as other state laws relating to privacy, data protection, information security, and conduct in connection with data breaches;

•The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, and the regulations promulgated thereunder, which impose various consumer consent requirements and other restrictions in connection with telemarketing activity and other communication with consumers by phone, fax or text message, and which provide guidelines designed to safeguard consumer privacy in connection with such communications;

•The Federal Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, or CAN-SPAM Act, and the Telemarketing Sales Rule, or TSR, and analogous state laws, which impose various restrictions on marketing conducted by use of email, telephone, fax or text message;

•The Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, or ESIGN Act, and similar state laws, particularly Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, or UETA, which authorize the creation of legally binding and enforceable agreements utilizing electronic records and signatures and which require financial services firms to obtain a consumer’s consent to electronically receive disclosures required under federal and state laws and regulations;

•The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, which has been interpreted to include websites as “places of public accommodations” that must meet certain federal requirements related to access and use;

•The Right to Financial Privacy Act, or RFPA and similar state laws enacted to provide the financial records of financial services firms’ customers a reasonable amount of privacy from government scrutiny;

•The Bank Secrecy Act, or BSA and the USA PATRIOT Act, which relate to compliance with anti-money laundering, borrower due diligence and record-keeping policies and procedures;

•The regulations promulgated by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC under the U.S. Treasury Department related to the administration and enforcement of sanctions against foreign jurisdictions and persons that threaten U.S. foreign policy and national security goals, primarily to prevent targeted jurisdictions and persons from accessing the U.S. financial system; and

•Other state-specific and local laws and regulations.

In addition to the laws, regulations, and rules that apply to our customers, and that we facilitate compliance with, we, in our capacity as a service provider to financial services firms and as a provider of marketplace services directly to consumers, and our partners, vendors, and other service providers, may be deemed to be subject to certain laws, regulations, and rules through our relationships with our customers including RESPA, FCRA, FTC Act, GLBA, FHA, TCPA, the CAN-SPAM Act, TSR, ESIGN Act, ADA, OFAC, and state laws and regulations, including those that impose requirements related to unfair or deceptive business practices and consumer protection, as well as other state-specific laws relating to privacy, information security, data protection, and conduct in connection with data breaches.

We are also subject to a variety of laws, rules, and regulations relating to the property and casualty insurance, title insurance and settlement services industries, mobile- and internet-based businesses, and information security, advertising, privacy, data protection, and consumer protection laws. For example, we are subject to extensive licensing, anti-kickback, rate, and settlement practices regulations by the applicable state agencies in the jurisdictions in which our title insurance business operates. Title insurance rates are regulated differently in various states, with some states requiring us to file and receive approval of rates before such rates become effective and some states promulgating the rates that can be charged. See “Risk

Factors—Risks Related to Our Legal and Regulatory Environment” for additional information and a discussion of our regulatory risks.

Data Privacy and Security

The data we collect, use, receive, and otherwise process is integral to our business, providing us with insights to improve our software platform and our products. Our collection, use, receipt, and other processing of data in our business subjects us to numerous U.S. state, federal, and foreign laws and regulations addressing privacy, data protection, information security, and the collection, storing, sharing, use, transfer, disclosure, protection and processing of certain types of data. Such regulations include, for example, GLBA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, CAN-SPAM, Canada’s Anti-Spam Law, TCPA, FCRA, the FTC Act, the CCPA, and regulations of relevant regulatory authorities, including the New York Department of Financial Services. We work to comply with, and to help allow customers to comply with, applicable laws and regulations relating to privacy, data protection and information security. This helps underpin our strategy of building trust and providing a strong experience to customers.

Despite our efforts to comply with applicable laws, regulations, and other obligations relating to privacy, data protection, and information security, it is possible that our interpretations of the law, practices, or software platform could be inconsistent with, or fail or be alleged to fail to meet all requirements of, such laws, regulations, or obligations. Our failure, or the failure by our partners, vendors, service providers, or customers, to comply with applicable laws or regulations or any other obligations relating to privacy, data protection, or information security, or any compromise of security that results in unauthorized access to, or use or release of personal information or other data relating to consumers or other individuals, or the perception that any of the foregoing types of failure or compromise has occurred, could damage our reputation, discourage new and existing customers and consumers from using our software platform, or result in fines, investigations, or proceedings by governmental agencies and private claims and litigation, any of which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.

See the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Legal and Regulatory Environment—Changes in laws or regulations relating to privacy, information security, data protection or the protection or transfer of personal information, or any actual or perceived failure by us to comply with such laws and regulations or any other obligations relating to privacy, information security, data protection or the protection or transfer of personal information, could adversely affect our business.” for additional information about our approach to laws and regulations relating to privacy, data protection, and information security.

Human Capital

Our employees are a key reason for our success and are essential for our continued growth. Our culture, industry success, and competitive compensation enable us to successfully retain our employees and to effectively recruit new talent aligned with our vision.

As of December 31, 2024, we had a total of 540 employees. Since April 2022, we have undertaken several workforce reduction actions as part of our broader efforts to improve cost efficiency and better align our operating structure with our business activities. We offered our terminated employees severance pay with continued health insurance coverage, COBRA pay, and outplacement services to assist them in finding their next opportunity. Other offerings included access to a Talent Network where they can register to share their resume with thousands of recruiters and companies looking for great talent and continued access to Blend’s employee assistance program, which offers free and confidential support and counseling to employees, their spouses, and their dependents.

None of our employees are represented by a labor union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be good.

Corporate Information

Blend Labs, Inc. was incorporated in the state of Delaware on April 17, 2012. Our principal executive offices are located at 7250 Redwood Blvd., Suite 300, Novato, California 94945, and our telephone number is (650) 550-4810.

Additional Information

Our website is located at https://www.blend.com and our investor relations website is located at https://investor.blend.com. Copies of our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, our Proxy Statement for our annual meeting of stockholders and amendments to these reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act, are available free of charge on our investor relations website as soon as reasonably practicable after we file such material electronically with or furnish it to the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). The SEC also maintains a website that contains our SEC filings at https://www.sec.gov.

We have used, and intend to continue to use, our website, investor relations website, news site (https://www. https://blend.com/company/newsroom), blog (https://blend.com/blog) and social media accounts, including our X account (@blendlabsinc), our Facebook account (@BlendLabs) and our Instagram account (@blendlabs), as a means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD.

The contents of the websites provided above are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC. Further, our references to the URLs for these websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.