Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to Blend Labs' first quarter 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will hold a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I would now like to hand the conference over to management for prepared remarks. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and welcome to Blend's financial results conference call for the first quarter of 2026. I'm Meg Nunnally, Blend's Head of Investor Relations. Joining me today is Nima Ghamsari, our Co-founder and Head of Blend, and Jason Ream, our Head of Finance and Administration. Before we start today's call, I'd like to note that we refer to certain non-GAAP measures, which are reconciled to GAAP measures in today's earnings release and in the appendix of our supplemental slides. Non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for GAAP results. Unless otherwise stated, all financial measures we'll discuss today, including our profitability, refer to non-GAAP.
Also, certain statements made during today's conference call regarding Blend and its operations, in particular, our guidance for the second quarter of 2026, other commentary regarding 2026, and our expectations about markets, our strategic investments, product development plans, and operational targets may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. We caution you that forward-looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties, and a number of factors, many of which are beyond the company's control, could cause actual results, events or circumstances to differ materially from those described in these statements. Please see the risk factors we've identified in our most recent 10-K for fiscal year 2025 and our other SEC filings. We are not undertaking any commitment to update these statements if conditions change except as required by law.
The financial information presented on this call is based on continuing operations, and prior periods have been recast to exclude operations that are now discontinued. Lastly, we will be providing a copy of our prepared remarks on our website by the conclusion of today's call, and an audio replay will also be available soon after the call. I will now turn the call over to Nima.
Thanks, Meg, and welcome everyone. It's been a whirlwind two months since our last call. We reported our Q1 numbers today, which Jason Ream will spend time on, but came in higher on revenue and non-GAAP operating income than expected. We also signed 15 new deals and expansions in the quarter, including an e-closed deal with a top 20 bank, along with a new mortgage deal with another top 100 bank. Our pipeline as of March 31st is up more than 40% year-over-year, and that doesn't include the Autopilot pipeline, which I will cover in a minute. The world has shifted underneath us in those two months. Increased global conflict, inflation, and a rise in mortgage rates. That leads me to be a little conservative in the short-term numbers, but I am incredibly optimistic about the future.
My optimism comes from 2 things, and they are both tied to artificial intelligence. The first is Autopilot, which is our AI agent and orchestration layer that we put right alongside our customers' work as they work with consumers. The second is the agents we're building inside Blend, which are starting to do our own work. Together, I believe these 2 pillars give us a path to see 10%-15% incremental growth already for us in 2027 on the top line and more efficiency and speed as a company internally. Let's start with Autopilot. For those new to the story, Autopilot is our flagship AI agent. We unveiled it and rolled it out in beta almost exactly 2 months ago, telling our customers they could use it for free and try it out for all of Q2 to see it in action and help their business.
As of Monday, May 4th, 65 lenders have activated Autopilot. 22 are running it live in production, over 7,000 applications have already been touched by Autopilot since we moved it to live production. We're seeing their early results are improving, both in cycle time and in conversion rate. 2 of our largest lenders are actively implementing Autopilot right now with go-lives planned for Q2, we have 3 more top 20 logos in our net new pipeline that we expect Autopilot to be a meaningful catalyst for closing those new logos. In total, we're already sitting on $10 million in pipeline because it solves a real problem for our customers and the consumers they serve. The more important story for me and for our company and for our customers and our shareholders is how quickly that product is evolving.
We've been publishing details to our blog every week. There are two that I wanna call out. The first is Autopilot Chat. That was rolled out about a month ago, a conversational interface where the borrower can ask Autopilot questions about their loan in plain language as they're going through the process. What documents are still needed? Why'd you ask me for this specific thing? Why does it matter in my situation? What happens next? Instead of a static task list or making a phone call, the borrower can have a real contextual understanding of what's going on to help them through the process. This is the kind of interaction that consumers are starting to expect. We are right on top of it. The second is something I'm even more excited about, which is Autopilot MCP.
That opens up the Blend Platform so that our customers can build their own agents on top of Blend or use Blend in a headless way in their existing workflows and still get the benefit of all the compliance, all the data model, the workflows, all the native integrations we built, and the intelligence layer of Autopilot. One of our large mortgage company customers has already built a voice agent using it, and I'm seeing this really important and really promising for our customers who want to own more and more things they can do, but to move really fast. That pattern, customers innovating with us and around us rather than instead of us, is exactly what we want and exactly what we expect to see more of going forward. This all adds up to is something I think is really powerful.
Our customers can now see a path from initial borrower touch all the way to clear to close without a team member ever having to touch a file. They still can work on the file, but they won't have to. That is fundamentally different value than we could ever offer before or the industry could ever offer, and something that I dreamed of being able to offer when I started the company in 2012, and now agentic AI has made that dream possible. On top of that, 8 weeks in, we're shipping at a cadence that Blend of years ago and most enterprise software companies would measure in quarters. Every one of those updates is ground on what our customers need, what they're telling us they want, and how we can help impact and improve their business.
With adoption well underway, let me give you an update on how we're gonna monetize this. Autopilot has been in preview to date, and our priority has been getting real customers live and proving the value. Starting at the end of June, we're gonna move to paid tiers. Just like any modern software company, there's gonna be some base capabilities just built into our workflow that are gonna provide intelligence, like did you upload the right document? That's useful. That's gonna lower some friction for consumers to get started and understand AI. The paid tiers are where the full product lives, what we call underwriting intelligence, where Autopilot is reading the documents, taking real action on the loan file, running calculations, reconciling against guidelines, and driving the work forward.
Over time, our intent is to move the paid tiers of Autopilot to a per-funded loan model, just like the rest of our Mortgage Suite. It's the right long-term structure, our customers like that because it allows them to see and track the value on a per-loan basis, and we get paid when they make a successful loan. That's a great product for us. It's a great alignment for us with our customers, and it incentivizes us to make sure this is providing real loan-level funded value improvements. When Autopilot helps a lender fund more loans with the same number of people, our revenue scales with their success, not with their headcount, and that is how we've always built Blend, and that's even more important today in an agent-first world.
We're gonna continue to provide updates on Autopilot as more customers sign on. I want investors to understand this is not a small incremental line item for us. Autopilot is a whole new leg of growth for the company on top of the great Mortgage Suite and Consumer Banking Suite that are already growing. We plan to keep growing it. Before we move off Autopilot, I wanna spend a minute on something that I think is really important. I keep getting asked about from investors. The billion-dollar question is: where does the durable value in enterprise AI actually accrue? This is an ongoing debate. It's important to understand where Blend fits and where how I see this. For the last couple years, the focus of the industry and the world broadly has been on the foundation models.
Which model is the fastest, the smartest, does the best in benchmarks, the cheapest? That focus is understandable. As models converge in capability and keep innovating, the durable value is shifting up the stack to the orchestration layer between the model and the workflow, to the area what people call the harness and the thing that's driving actual end business outcomes. The harness, to put it clearly, is it's the system that channels the engine and all the tools around it into a reliable, controlled outcome, which is so important for an industry like ours, like financial services. The data and the documents and the specific context of any moment is the fuel that makes any of that work actually useful. Autopilot is exactly that. It is not a model.
In Autopilot, we use the best available models underneath. Instead, it's the orchestration layer that decides what to do given that exact moment in a loan. It retrieves the specific guidelines, gets the full context of the loan, runs the right calculations, validates the outputs against investor and regulatory requirements, updates the loan file, and triggers the native Blend workflows that move the file forward. That logic is specific to that exact loan and exact consumer in front of it, and it's the kind of work that generic AI isn't built to do. It needs a system around it. That's where Autopilot fits in. Autopilot MCP just takes that to the next level.
It allows the Blend Platform users to build their own agents or even build work with Blend in a completely headless way, which means the harness becomes a platform for them to move really fast because they get all the regulation, the compliance, the integrations, and the Autopilot intelligence out of the box, and they can build their own experiences and their own agents around that, which is just a meaningfully a different level of importance because now you become more of the engine, the powered by, instead of the interface, and that's where agents can be really powerful. That compounds more as we open up more capabilities for our customers to build faster and on top of us. That is why I get more confident every quarter about where Blend sits in the AI landscape. We are the vertical industry harness for origination.
We have the proprietary data to make that harness work. We have the business model already to help capture the benefit of automation and still give most of the benefit to the end, to the customer and hopefully the consumer, but that's the durable place to be, and that's why I'm excited that's where Autopilot is. Yeah, so we're bullish on our first pillar, which is agents for our customers. I'm even more bullish on something which is what our internal work, how we're using agents there. Over the last few months, we've been building something that we're boringly calling Blend Background Agents. It's not a new idea, but it's a simple idea.
Anytime we get an input from the outside world, it could be a ticket, a customer issue, a feature request, before that reaches a team member, we want an agent to take the first pass of that work and take action on that, and the team member reviews and approves it. In practice, that could be something like a ticket comes in that outlines a bug in our system. An agent immediately picks it up from our support queue, looks at it, identifies the bug, writes the code to fix the bug, tests the code to make sure the bug is now fixed, and then sends it to a human and says, "Hey, I had to change these 10 lines or 50 lines of code. Can you approve this?"
That moves our team from manually driving the car and making the turns and figuring how to get from A to B to playing air traffic control with hopefully dozens of cars. To support that, we've given our agents access to our internal tools, our entire code base, the ability to stand up environments, and they will now take up the first pass before our engineers, our support team ever see that issue. When I look at the numbers, the new process of how we're adopting AI at Blend has already resulted in more than 1.5x productivity in 2026 versus 2025 based on number of pull requests our engineering team is doing. That we're just getting started with that. Prospects and customers are already taking notice of how fast we're moving. I get notes from customers all the time.
I've been on site with our biggest customers in the last month, and I can tell you that momentum is palpable. Our customers have noticed a change in our quality and speed. I want to be clear, this is not a one-team experiment. This exact same pattern of agents doing the first pass of work should apply to every role in every company, and specifically in Blend, it will apply to our roles here. That could be something like onboarding a new customer, preparing for a customer business review or going on site with them, or even something as esoteric as getting a manual Excel worksheet that comes in that outlines what loans have been funded for our accounting team, doing that work before our accounting team even has to pick it up.
I said on the last call that we aim to be in the top 1% of all companies in terms of agentic AI adoption, and I really meant it. We're going to do it. It's something I'm very passionate about, we're going to keep driving for that. When done, I believe this effort, combined with Autopilot, that's created the path to 10%-15% more top-line growth and a lot more efficiency and speed for us. That speed is probably the most important thing for any business, and especially for a company like Blend. It means more customer issues fixed, more great features developed, more things like we've done with Autopilot, continuing to grow Autopilot, faster time closing a quarter, better preparedness for customer business reviews. These will be the new Blend.
To wrap up, transforming a company of our size into an agent-first company is definitely more work and more complicated than the world understands, but it's worth it. We have a really important mission. Our customers serve millions of consumers across the country every single year, so this change cannot come fast enough. We are taking it as fast as we can, and we feel like, to be quite candid, from my perspective, the best positioned company in the space. It is something that I spend a lot of my time on and the team is even more passionate about.
you know, while the war and tariffs and oil and all those things might have create some conservatism around short-term mortgage market numbers because the macro and the rollout time for building might also take some time, I have never been more energized about kind of the medium term and hopefully even the long term for our customers, our team, and our investors. With that, I'll turn it over to Jason Ream to walk through the financials.
Thanks, Nima, and thank you to everyone else joining us on the call. We delivered a strong start to 2026, with both revenue and non-GAAP operating income above the high end of our guidance ranges. Revenue grew 15% year-over-year, and our non-GAAP operating margin expanded to 13%, reflecting growth across the business and reflecting the operating leverage we have continued to build into the model. Total revenue in the first quarter of 2026 was $30.8 million above the high end of our guidance range, driven by growth in Mortgage Suite and consumer banking alike. Mortgage Suite revenue was $17.2 million, up 18% year-over-year. Funded loans on our platform were approximately 187,000 in Q1, up 29% year-over-year and slightly better than we had assumed coming into the quarter.
That strong volume growth was partially offset by a lower year-over-year economic value per funded loan, which came in at $84 in Q1, within the $84-$85 range we discussed on our last call. We were at the lower end of our range primarily because of higher mortgage volumes, which mechanically lowers the per loan economics calculation given some of the fixed fee arrangements that we have within our customer base. Consumer Banking Suite revenue for this first quarter was $10.8 million, up 12% year-over-year and consistent with the color we shared on our last call.
Professional Services revenue for the first quarter was $2.9 million, up sequentially from $2.1 million in Q4. Of the $2.9 million in Professional Services revenue, approximately $600,000 related to work completed in prior periods that was recognized this quarter under our revenue recognition policies. We would not expect a similar catch-up amount in future quarters. Turning to profitability, non-GAAP gross profit was $24.8 million, and our non-GAAP gross margin was 80.3%, up from 72.9% in the first quarter of 2025. I would note that gross profit in the quarter benefited from the PS catch-up that I just mentioned, as well as some one-time cost of revenue benefit that together brought gross margin for the quarter up by about 2-3 points.
Please keep that in mind as you think about modeling gross margin going forward. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $20.7 million in Q1, up 10% year-over-year. As a reminder, the year-over-year comparison reflects the change in our internally developed software capitalization methodology that we discussed last quarter, where we are capitalizing less of our R&D personnel cost than we did in 2025. This is an accounting treatment change rather than a change in the nature of our R&D investment. As a result, reported R&D looks elevated on a year-over-year basis, an effect that will persist to some extent throughout 2026 until we lap prior year periods.
Non-GAAP operating income was $4.1 million above the high end of our $2 million-$3 million guidance range and representing a non-GAAP operating margin of nearly 13%. An improvement of approximately 10 points compared with the first quarter of 2025. Free cash flow for the quarter was $7.3 million compared to $15.5 million in the prior year. We're pleased with the strong cash flow generation and want to remind you of our seasonal patterns, where Q1 is typically a strong collections quarter in our business. Our balance sheet remains strong. We ended the quarter with $59 million in cash equivalents and marketable securities and zero debt.
Putting our cash to work, we repurchased 11.2 million shares during the quarter at an average price of $1.66 per share under our share repurchase program, deploying $18.6 million of the $50 million authorization we announced on our last call. As we said last quarter, this program reflects our conviction in the long-term value of the business and our commitment to disciplined capital allocation. With 0 debt and a solid liquidity position, we have the balance sheet to invest in both the business and in our shareholders simultaneously. Before I turn to outlook, I want to spend a moment on market share and on the macro environment.
On market share, the initial release of 2025 HMDA data in early April showed approximately 4.4 million originations for the year, which puts our 2025 mortgage market share at approximately 17%, squarely in the middle of the 16%-18% range we guided to back in November. The HMDA data will continue to settle as late filings come in, but we don't expect that figure to move meaningfully. As we look into 2026, we expect a market share headwind of approximately 100 basis points, primarily reflecting the volume roll-off of one large customer that we've discussed previously. At this time, we don't see any other significant headwinds to our market share. On the macro side, the spring housing market started on stronger footing than many had expected, supported by improving affordability and slowly rebuilding inventory.
That said, the recent rise in mortgage interest rates adds uncertainty to the outlook. Fannie Mae's most recent forecast calls for total mortgage market growth of approximately 19% year-over-year in 2026, but Fannie reduced both its second quarter and full year 2026 outlooks earlier this month as rates have moved higher. Our own 2026 view is anchored to that updated Fannie outlook. We will remain cautious in our outlook until rates come down meaningfully and refi activity picks up. We have the platform and the customer base in place to capture the upside when conditions improve. Now, let's turn to guidance. For the second quarter of 2026, we expect total revenue to be between $32 million and $34 million, representing approximately 1%-7% year-over-year growth.
Underneath those headline numbers, we expect Mortgage Suite revenue to grow 4%-10% year-over-year, driven by mortgage market volume growth and partially offset by a year-over-year decline in economic value per funded loan, which we expect to be in the $79-$80 range in Q2. The decline in EVPFL from Q1 to Q2 is primarily driven by increased volume, which as I mentioned earlier, mechanically lowers EVPFL. We expect year-over-year Consumer Banking Suite revenue growth to be between -2% to +4% in Q2. We expect Q2 non-GAAP operating income to be between $5.5 million and $6.5 million, implying a non-GAAP operating margin at the midpoint of approximately 18%. A few additional notes on what's embedded in our expectations.
Our Mortgage Suite business continues to be subject to macro volume fluctuations. Depending on the trajectory of mortgage rates and the broader housing market from here, Mortgage Suite revenue could moderate or even flatten out in the back half of 2026, particularly if refi activity remains soft. On per loan economics, Q1 is typically the high watermark due to seasonality. Which is why we are guiding to a Q1 to Q2 step down from $84 in Q1 to $79-$80 in Q2. In the absence of an uplift from Autopilot, which is too early to quantify and is not baked into any of our expectations, we would expect EVPFL in the second half of 2026 to fluctuate with seasonality but still stay below Q1 levels. On consumer banking, growth is moderating based on the headwinds we discussed on our last earnings call.
In addition, we've also seen softer macro-driven volumes on home equity as rates have moved higher. Combining these two factors, we expect single-digit year-over-year growth in Consumer Banking in the back half of 2026, with Q3 growth likely lower than Q4 given the year-over-year compares. There is macro sensitivity in the home equity portion of our Consumer Banking business. If rates rise from here, our expectation would be to see additional pressure on those growth rates. Finally, I'd like to touch specifically on Autopilot. While we are incredibly excited about the potential for Autopilot to generate revenue upside, we'd encourage investors to be cautious about incorporating this into models at this juncture. We hope and plan to provide additional information on potential impact to the outlook as we get past the free trial period and have a little bit more time under our belt.
In summary, we feel very good about the shape of the business heading into the rest of 2026. Q1 marked our second consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in mortgage. With churn now stabilized and the partnership model transition behind us, we expect most of the variability in mortgage revenue from here to be macro-driven. Cost discipline remains intact. We expect to continue to drive additional productivity and efficiency over the year as AI-enabled workflows compound across our internal processes, an effort that, as Nima discussed, is now well underway across the company. This is indeed an exciting time for Blend. We hope that you're excited to be part of it too. With that, let's open up the call to your questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you're muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by now while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Ryan Tomasello with KBW. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thanks, everyone. Nima, in your prepared remarks, you mentioned that Autopilot and your AI initiatives present a path, I think, to what you said was 10%-15% more top-line growth. Can you just put a finer point on what you mean by that and what underpins your confidence in quantifying the benefits at this stage?
Yeah. Great, great to hear from you, Ryan. I mean, I'd say I'd start with our current pipeline. Our current Autopilot pipeline is about $10 million. We've only been in the market for just over a month now with pricing with our customers. You know, we have a lot of customers who've turned it on. Really positive feedback we're getting. I mentioned two really large go-lives with customers. If we can keep up that momentum, I think of it as 10%-15% incremental on top of whatever other growth you may be forecasting coming from Autopilot is what we're, you know, as we see a path to right now. We obviously have to keep executing. We have a lot of work in front of us. The product is awesome, and our customers love it.
Great. Maybe just turning to consumer banking. Given the noise in that segment from the large customer churn, maybe you can just help us understand where the underlying revenue growth is running in that business, both for 1Q, you know, just at a higher level, based on the data points you've given previously about, I think, was it two and a half million dollar impact from that large client in consumer banking? It just seems like the growth profile there is coming in a bit weaker than what was initially hoped for. Nima, just your broader commentary around how you feel about the strength of that business going forward. Thanks.
Yeah. I'd say, yeah, the biggest is from that large customer and, you know, they had a pretty big consumer banking line item that you called out. But I'd say on the positive side, we have some very, you know, good, you know, good-sized financial institutions going live with our wall-to-wall suite this year. Those rollouts are in progress, we're excited about that. Once that hits, I think that'll be a positive benefit. We also have great customers rolling out our Rapid Home Equity product as we speak, that'll be another positive catalyst for us as that happens. You know, I, obviously, the home equity market has other macro things as well that are going on.
You know, there's enough new things that are happening on the consumer banking side broadly that makes me feel really good about the consumer banking business.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Appreciate it. Nima, I appreciate all the color on Autopilot and Autopilot MCP, I guess. It sounds like obviously a lot of customers here are interested in piloting. I think you called out some of the e arly proof points around improved cycle times and conversion rates. I wonder if you could kind of provide a little bit more color on, like, what that looks like relative to a non-automated process to try to just tangibly put some value on what customers are seeing and learning, and then maybe how you're also thinking about the deployment or utilization of the first-party agents versus kind of some of the MCP-enabled agents and maybe the economic variability between those. Thank you.
Yeah. On the impact, you know, there's 2 anecdotes I'll share for 2 of the customers who have been sort of the biggest users of it. We helped them track the cycle time and the conversion. The conversion is less obvious why the conversion is, I actually had talked to 1 of our customers about this. I'll get to that in a second. The cycle time with 1 of the customers, for example, from application complete and Blend to closing docs being sent to the customer, or closing disclosures I should say, being sent to the customer, it went from 29 to 21 days in, you know, 1 of the customers that we had. That's pretty meaningful improvement in their cycle times.
It makes sense, I think, fundamentally, because customers have a lot of back and forth with consumers. What Autopilot does is, in real time, as the consumer's in the flow, it finds those things that are going to be the gotchas down the line. It shows the consumer, "Hey, we noticed that this account is in the name of a trust. We need to get your trust documentation right now," versus asking for it a few days later once an underwriter reviews it and sends it to a processor, which sends it back to the loan officer.
It sort of short-circuits the process in a positive way. You know, our hope with Autopilot plus some of the Rapid products is you put, you know, those two things together, I'll call it Rapid Pilot, you can get an application started, approved, because Rapid gives you an approval and an offer upfront. Then once that customer is ready to go, get them clear to close in a matter of minutes. That's the world we wanna enable for our customers and consumers, or maybe conditionally clear to close on an appraisal if there's an appraisal necessary for a mortgage. I think those are some positive numbers.
I think where I've been more surprised is why the conversion is so much better, but I guess it makes sense. When you can give people more certainty faster, we're seeing good conversion uplift too, which, you know, obviously it's early, but that's even more valuable to our customers. 'Cause those are consumers that would be walking out the door that you'd spent time and money on as a lender, not just on things like credit pulls and, other data pulls, but also your team's time and energy that went into that. As we can shorten these cycles and make the process of lending more real time, I think it fundamentally transforms the industry.
One thing I wanted to say about consumer banking, because we're in the process of building out the integrations to all the consumer banking products for Autopilot, I think there's opportunity there. Now, there's fewer manual tasks in consumer banking, but there's a lot more volume of those tasks in terms of number of units that these customers do. While it may not be worth thousands of dollars a loan to our customers long-term in consumer banking or per new account, you know, the scale of these things does really matter to them, and they have very big operations teams managing these processes. It's an important thing for them to be able to do a lot more volume with those teams, and I think Autopilot enables that.
Got it.
One other thing.
maybe other Yeah.
I just was reminded of this. The other thing that I think has been a historical struggle, I mentioned this in my prepared remarks, is rates are. They really drive refi activity in particular. If you're a mortgage servicer and you have a lot of your volume in refi, your only way to handle large amounts of volume is to scale up and scale to, historically, has been to scale up and scale down teams. You don't get to really predict when rates go down. I mean, you try to, but it's very hard to predict when the next, you know, new numbers are gonna come out, what the numbers are gonna be. You know, the ability to create elasticity of workforce when now you have agents that a lender can spin up and spin down alongside their team.
Before their team is doing the work, the agents are taking a first pass. I mean, it just changes the economic profile of servicing and recapture of servicing. I mean, I think for our large servicing customers, which we have many, it's gonna change the way that they're able to do business, because it's gonna allow them to handle these fluctuations in the market even better than even more importantly for them than someone on the purchase side.
Makes sense. Thank you, Nima. Then maybe for Jason Ream as a follow-up to that too, you kind of called out the per-funded loan dynamics and market share dynamics. I'd love to kind of double-click. Again, if you can remind us, 'cause it sounds like you're actually increasing market share with the customer momentum and the customers that are coming on online or being onboarded, but that's kind of working inversely upfront against per-funded loan volume. I guess remind us kind of the mechanics as to that, as well as maybe when we would expect that to flip and those 2 tailwinds maybe to work in tandem or in parallel to where you see market share growth inflection as well as per-funded loan expansion over time. Thank you.
Yeah. Good question, Dylan. I think, you know, we're seeing volume growth. As I mentioned, we had better volume in Q1 than we had expected even coming into the quarter. You know, part of that is I think our customers doing better. Part of that was the market was a little bit better than we expected in the quarter. Of course, yes, we're always trying to add, you know, add share and bring new customers onto the Platform. As far as the per-funded loan, putting aside, you know, the seasonal variability that comes from the mechanics I talked about, you know, we are, I think, doing a much more concerted effort now to drive growth year-over-year with existing customers.
I think that, look, things like Autopilot give us better pricing leverage coming in to new customer situations. Obviously, that drives its own revenue stream, but it also gives us leverage in the sort of the core platform as well. You know, I think Rapid, you know, remains a driver as well on the refi side in particular. As Nima mentioned, you know, refi is even more sensitive to rates than purchase. We don't have a Rapid purchase, you know, product. We have a Rapid Refi product. As rates come down, we should see a benefit in volume and revenue in that sense. Also, you know, as we get more customers up on Rapid Refi, see a benefit in PFL as well.
Great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. Nima, what's the update on the Rapid products uptake, how you're seeing market reaction to them? Obviously, you know, the market backdrop isn't as strong as we'd like, but you know, some of the feedback you're getting. I'll have a follow-up.
I would say, you know, I'd reiterate what I said about this Rapid Pilot that seems to be getting the momentum and focus from our customers. You know, Rapid plus Autopilot together, it's a lot of what I spend my time on. I've had two on-sites with two very large banks and lenders in the last two weeks about this specific thing, that they want to get live in Q2. In practice, you know, our customers want to be able to, especially for refis and home equity, they want to be able to make an offer in real time, and then they want to be able to fulfill the work that they need to get done on that offer in real time. The combination of those two things has been incredibly powerful.
On top of that, we have, like I said, you know, also earlier in a previous question, we have some very, very large customers going live with Rapid Home Equity, including some of the top home equity originators in the country. You know, it's definitely a good time in the industry. I'd say if I had to, you know, if I had one criticism of myself here, it would be: How do I make this so easy to adopt that they flip a switch and they turn it on, and now they have Rapid Refi enabled in their environment? I mean, I think that's a challenge for us, something we're thinking about going into the next couple months. We intend to make that happen.
It's something that as we make that happen, our customers will be able to adopt it so much easier. That was actually a key learning for us from the Autopilot work and rollout that we did, where, you know, we made it truly self-serve for a customer to turn that on, and we're seeing the adoption. I mean, the numbers that we shared in terms of number of lenders that have turned this on as a percentage of our total, but just in a, you know, think about large financial institutions turning on a new AI agent for their organization with the flip of a switch without even calling us. I mean, the most surprising part was we had fairly large banks, very large banks, turning this on in beta and production without us even knowing about it.
Then we saw it start to stream through our logs, and we said, "Oh, we should probably reach out to them and talk to them about it." I mean, that's not to say we're a product-led growth company. We do like to talk to our customers to help them get the most of our product. Making things easy to adopt is going to be very good for Blend, and everything comes back to speed. Speed of adoption, speed of iteration for our team.
If we're able to do those things, which I'm very confident we showed that with Autopilot, I'm very confident we can do that and take that micro culture and micro product, those concepts to the rest of all the things that we do at Blend, then I think we can help fundamentally change the landscape of how our products are used and how they can impact our customers. I'll end with one last anecdote, you know, that, you know, I think Autopilot MCP, I know this wasn't exactly your question, but Autopilot MCP has unlocked a lot of doors for us because, you know, I was on site with one fairly large customer last week, and they, you know, they had their head of engineering in the room.
They, you know, the first thing the head of engineering asked was like, "Hey, we want to build this into our mobile app." I was like, "Great. You now have a way to do that, and it's called Autopilot MCP. You can get all the capabilities of Blend and the intelligence layer of Autopilot entirely in your own environment." So he was like, "Wow, okay." His first question to me, which was, is like a compelling one, was, "Can I use this in other parts of my business? We don't use Blend for, you know, these other kinds of loans." He named a couple other kinds of loans. I was like, "Yeah, sure. Autopilot works. You can put custom guidelines in there yourself. You don't even need to talk to us."
His eyes lit up, and he asked the first thing he asked while we were in the room, it was a pretty big room, was a copy of the Autopilot MCP documentation, which we sent to him. So, you know, those are people who have historically, you know, struggled with how to fit themselves into this Blend world or fit their tech stack into the Blend world, and now we've opened that up. We had another really interesting sales call with a fairly large bank, you know, the digital leader came on the call. That's historically another one that feels a little bit displaced by us in sometimes when we're brought in.
His first question was, "Can I use this with my current digital stack?" As soon as that, the answer to that was, "Yes, of course," now with Autopilot MCP, he went from probably being somebody who would be a detractor to someone who was saying, "Oh, wow, this is actually really interesting." Now I can give new digital capabilities. How can it help improve my customer experience in a powered by way that you know, would take months, if not years to, for them to do internally and building agents that are this powerful and this complex. I know that wasn't exactly your question, Joe, but I just was remembering that as I was talking.
Yeah, no, it's an exciting setup for sure. Thanks for that color and looking forward to progress on that front. Thank you.
A reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one now to raise your hand. Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Kimson with Citizens. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for the questions. Nima, in your conversations, how do customers perceive the value that Autopilot's providing today? Do you feel like it's still primarily being thought of as a component of tech budgets? Are financial institutions increasingly open to viewing agentic products like Autopilot as a component of their labor budgets?
I, you know, it's, it's interesting. I think right now companies are figuring this out as we speak. They don't know the answer to that exact question that you have. It actually goes to how we price this in the short term to allow our customers in the short term to use it both for a few months free of charge. Even after that, we're gonna have sort of flat pricing that's obviously good for us economically, but also good for our customers to give them time, you know, in the short term to, you know, make the right changes they need to make to their process, to organizations. I'd say long term, they're all aligned to the fact that labor is something that doesn't need to be scaled up and down with volume anymore.
I was having a conversation with the CEO of one of our large customers, and, you know, the idea of being able to scale their organization without having to add, you know, thousands or more heads is so compelling. It naturally ends up being a labor question. I think the, probably the more important value proposition, it, you know, as these numbers around conversion rates sort of get set in stone and we have better understanding of that's gonna be even more valuable to our customers 'cause there's so many consumers in this country who can benefit from lower interest rates or equity from their homes or consolidating debt or all these things that are happening that has been historically hard for our customers to capture.
It's hard for consumers because they have to go through a very lengthy process. Now if we can make it really transparent with something like Rapid and then really automated with something like Autopilot, it's gonna change, you know, it's gonna make it so that consumers will have less friction in this process and therefore more consumers will do it, and they'll do it with our customers.
Got it. That's helpful. One more. You've been working with financial institutions for a long time now. Can you talk about the appetite for adopting new products faster today than in the past, and how they're thinking about build versus buy, the balance between adopting AI products from AI-native startups versus established software vendors like Blend, and then where the Frontier Labs fit in? I think we're all trying to figure this out for application software in general. Thank you.
I think, you know, we're kind of in this interesting place where I, a switch flipped sometime in the first quarter of this year, I think February timeframe, where our customers started to realize, and maybe it was because of all the Anthropic Claude Code explosion that was happening in the market. They started to realize how important of a transformation this was going to be, and they've all put budgets behind AI and AI initiatives because they know it's important. It's important for their customers, it's important for their users, and it's really important for their long-term economics as a business. It can do really powerful things, and I think people are starting to believe that. It was no longer something that they felt was a future 2027, 2028 thing.
It was like, "Well, I can actually do this now." I think it sort of speaks for itself and then just the sheer number of our large financial institution customers that have turned this on, turned these capabilities on on their own and are in active discussions with us or in process with us of rolling out these capabilities broadly. Yeah, I think a switch flipped sometime early this year. They do sort of think through how do they fit this into our, into their stack. Is it a company like Blend that's already driving a lot of their work internally and for their customers?
Are they working with Anthropic or OpenAI or some other company in a, you know, sort of a big project in a consulting-like fashion, or are they working with a small startup? I'd say, you know, in the Blend versus or Autopilot versus small startup, where I view that is, you know, because we have so much of the workflow happening in our system already, which are natural entry points to invoke and spin up AI agents and then spin them back down, we have a pretty good advantage there to help move very, very quickly in those ways for our customers. Our job is to make sure Autopilot is the best product on the market for the exact types of work that our customers need to do.
In this case, maybe it's underwriting intelligence like I referenced in the prepared remarks. As long as we do those things, I don't think they're gonna go to a small startup. Like, we have to move fast, and we are moving fast, and we have to build a great product, and Autopilot is a great product. It's doing things that a year ago would have seemed like science fiction to our customers. I think there's a separate discussion around how do they think about the labs versus the large labs like Anthropic and OpenAI versus someone like a Blend. You know, I think some of that still remains to be seen.
I've heard of really great things the Labs are doing with a lot of our customers, and I think there's so much of the industry that's gonna change. The size of the pie is probably a lot bigger than anybody really understands. The Labs won't go in and try to build something into our workflow so that they can drive value for our customers. I mean, I don't think they would. But even if they would, we're already there. We already have it. Speed is very important in adoption, and if you have to do a 9-month or 12-month project to get something versus being able to flip a switch, our job is to make that possible.
Great. Thanks for the perspective there.
We have now reached the end of the Q&A session. This concludes today's call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.