Gresham House leads £16m round in digital savings and mortgage platform Tembo to tackle the homeownership crisis

Gresham House Ventures is pleased to announce a £16mn round in Tembo, a digital savings and mortgage platform helping to tackle the UK’s homeownership affordability crisis.

Tembo’s app enables users to save towards buying their home across a range of products, including its market-leading Lifetime ISA, Cash ISA and Fixed Rate ISAs, all designed to make progress towards a deposit, simple and visible. Tembo recently launched HomeSaver, a unique combined savings product that offers customers a top rate of 5.24% on their savings when they use Tembo’s free digital mortgage advice service to buy or remortgage their home, directly linking saving and borrowing in a way traditional providers do not.

Once customers are on the ladder, Tembo continues to support them. The app allows customers to track their mortgage live, showing the best available remortgage rate both with their existing lender and across the wider market, in real time.

Founded in 2020, Tembo achieved a breakout year in 2025, with its savings business growing 10x and reaching £3bn in assets under administration, as more customers used the Tembo app to save, plan and buy their first home. The new funding will be used to expand its app and end-to-end homebuying platform. Tembo is on track to have 20% market share of the UK first-time buyer market within two years.

Alongside the new investment from Gresham House Ventures, the round also included funding from existing investors Goodwater Capital, Aviva, McPike Family Office, Love Ventures, Ascension and British Business Bank.

The Gresham House Ventures deal team consisted of Rohit Mathur, Hamza Rafiq and Jack Woodnott. The deal continues a busy period of activity for Gresham House Ventures, having made investments into workplace trust platform Veremark, financial automation platform ARKK and specialist law firm Greenwoods Legal Services in recent months. Gresham House Ventures invests through the Gresham House VCTs and Baronsmead VCTs which are also currently fundraising, offering investors diversified access to a wide range of exciting UK growth companies.

Rohit Mathur, investment partner at Gresham House, said: “Home ownership in the UK has become one of the hardest financial milestones to reach, despite a £1.6 trillion mortgage market. Home buyers, especially first-time buyers, are expected to save more, faster, while navigating an increasingly complex mortgage landscape. Tembo brings those pieces together in one platform, helping people save smarter with its innovative products, and access mortgages with confidence – all with a digital-first experience. We see Tembo as a critical platform for improving access to home ownership in the UK, which is exactly why we chose to lead this round.”

Richard Dana, co-founder and CEO of Tembo, said: “This investment is a major milestone for Tembo as we continue building the platform that helps people not only find and secure a mortgage, but genuinely feel in control of their journey to homeownership, from the first pound they save to the day they get the keys. The time has come for a more digital, data-led approach to consumer mortgage and wealth journeys, and we believe Tembo is perfectly positioned to become the market leader over the coming years as more people look for a smarter, end-to-end way to get on and move up the property ladder.”