Toronto-based BrokerPlus has emerged from stealth with plans to help Canadian residential mortgage brokers use AI to grow their businesses and save time on administrative work.
Michael Hyatt is among the investors who have bought into the nascent startup’s vision of disrupting a large, “antiquated industry” with an especially small, AI-native team.
“I want people from the outside to think that we’re a team of 20 or 30 people, but in fact, we’re actually three or four.”
BrokerPlus was founded by CEO Swish Goswami and CTO Amir Agassi. Goswami is the co-founder and former CEO of Toronto-based consumer data and rewards platform Surf, which was acquired by Datacy in 2024. He most recently served as head of growth and marketing at AI-powered professional networking startup Boardy, where he crossed paths with Agassi, a software engineer serving on the Toronto company’s technical staff.
The pair left Boardy this March and teamed up to build BrokerPlus, setting their sights on modernizing a mortgage broker industry that remains largely reliant on spreadsheets and a patchwork of traditional applications. Since then, BrokerPlus has developed and launched a software platform designed to help mortgage brokers analyze their existing databases for missed mortgage renewal and refinance opportunities.
“There’s money in their dealbook that’s just leaking and they don’t know about it,” Goswami told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.
That offering is now used by clients across British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. By August, BrokerPlus expects to roll out an end-to-end platform designed to help those same customers drastically reduce their workloads and free them up to spend more time working directly with clients and other stakeholders. The startup has achieved this with only three employees, and aims to stay under five for the foreseeable future.
Building a sub-five-person business
At Surf, Goswami took a more traditional path to building a venture-backed software startup, building a 35-person team backed by close to $10 million CAD in funding from external investors. With BrokerPlus, Goswami hopes to build an even larger business with fewer staff, generating outsized financial returns for the folks involved while also retaining greater control over its own destiny. He claims that BrokerPlus can achieve profitability this year.
Goswami said the startup plans to achieve that by asking employees to “10x” themselves using AI. “I want people from the outside to think that we’re a team of 20 or 30 people, but in fact, we’re actually three or four—and that’s possible with AI.”
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Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke said recently during Toronto Tech Week that he thinks startups with only a handful of staff can now scale to billion-dollar businesses thanks to AI. BrokerPlus’ goal to use AI to build a sizeable company with a tiny team is not unique: other AI firms have already done this and are increasingly setting similar targets.
Goswami said BrokerPlus’ aim “isn’t to strictly not create jobs but to ensure that in a world of AI, we are incredibly disciplined about when we hire and how we maximize the output of every single employee at the organization.” The startup is also trying to practice what it is preaching to brokers internally, and he said its agility has proven beneficial during its early days.
Rewriting the playbook
BrokerPlus, which is currently fundraising, has already closed more than $500,000 CAD in pre-seed funding—Goswami declined to share exactly how much—from Michael Hyatt’s family office, Cowie Capital, Tennr co-founder Trey Holterman, and Bet99 co-founder Jared Beber.
In an interview with BetaKit, Hyatt said he was attracted by BrokerPlus’ plan to target an established market featuring multiple legacy software products, and use an AI-native team to deliver an AI product that unifies and extends those capabilities for a cheaper cost. He claimed early clients have been able to use it to replace as many as five other subscriptions.
“There’s money in their dealbook that’s just leaking and they don’t know about it.”
“They’re rewriting the playbook for mortgage brokers,” Hyatt said. The successful tech-entrepreneur-turned-angel-investor expects to see this model replicated in other verticals by smart, often younger founders who are also well-versed in AI.
BrokerPlus aims to make both its employees and the mortgage brokers it serves “superhuman” using AI. “Our value proposition to the broker is, ‘How would you like to be superhuman? How would you like to work eight hours a day and make four times more money?’” Hyatt said.
Hyatt is excited by how fast the startup is shipping and selling: BrokerPlus began generating revenue within a month of launching and is now delivering product updates every 30 days—far faster than traditional software firms, with far less staff and capital.
Hyatt, who is pitched daily by founders building the “AI of [something],” thinks AI is the future. “What I don’t believe is that every Tom, Dick, and Harry vibe-coding is the future,” he said. Hyatt is betting BrokerPlus’ work ethic and “maniacal customer focus” could make it a category winner.
Feature image courtesy BrokerPlus.