Athena's Co-Founders on Disrupting Australia's $1.7T Mortgage Market

Athena Home Loans: $200M Raised to Fix Australia's Mortgages

Nathan Walsh and Michael Starkey didn't leave comfortable corporate careers to build something incremental. They left to take on Australia's $1.7 trillion mortgage market — a market dominated by four banks that have had little incentive to change. In this episode of Fintech Chatter, the Athena Home Loans co-founders join me to discuss what it takes to build a digital mortgage platform from scratch, raise over $200 million in venture capital, and compete with incumbents who control the very funding markets you need to access.

How Athena Is Taking On Australia's $1.7 Trillion Mortgage Market

The core thesis behind Athena is simple: Australia's major banks charge borrowers too much and give them too little. The big four have operated with loyalty taxes — where existing customers pay higher rates than new ones — for decades. Most borrowers don't switch because the process is painful, opaque, and designed to keep them where they are.

Athena built a digital platform that strips out the costs the big banks bake into their margins. No application fees. No ongoing monthly or annual fees. No exit fees. No redraw or offset fees. The savings get passed directly to borrowers in the form of lower rates. Their Automatic Rate Match feature ensures existing customers never pay more than new ones on a like-for-like loan — a direct attack on the loyalty tax model.

The results speak for themselves. Athena has settled more than $8 billion in home loans since launch. Their Mortgage Choice Freedom white-label products, developed in partnership with REA Group, delivered $1.2 billion in settlements in FY24 alone. In September 2024, REA Group backed that partnership with a $62 million investment for a 19.9% stake, joining AirTree Ventures, AustralianSuper, Hostplus, Macquarie Bank, and Square Peg on the cap table.

Raising $200M From AustralianSuper, Square Peg and Macquarie

Athena has raised over $200 million across five funding rounds since its founding in June 2017. The investor list reads like a who's who of Australian institutional capital: AustralianSuper, Hostplus, Square Peg, AirTree, Macquarie Bank, Salesforce Ventures, NAB Ventures, Morgan Stanley, and Fidelity International. Their $70 million Series C in 2019 set a record as the largest capital raise ever led by local venture funds at the time.

What's notable about the cap table is the mix. You've got superannuation funds providing patient capital alongside venture firms pushing for growth, and strategic investors like Macquarie and REA Group who bring distribution and infrastructure. That's not an easy coalition to assemble, and it signals something about the founders — they've been able to sell a long-term vision while delivering short-term milestones.

Nathan and Michael talk candidly about the fundraising journey. Building a lending business requires a fundamentally different capital structure than a SaaS startup. You need equity to build the platform, but you also need debt facilities to fund the actual loans. Athena's Olympus RMBS programme raised an additional $1 billion in debt funding in 2024, bringing total debt capacity well beyond what most fintech lenders can access.

From NAB to Fintech: Why Nathan Walsh Left to Build Athena

Nathan Walsh's career before Athena is worth understanding because it explains why he's able to operate at this scale. He started at BCG, moved into senior roles at Citi and NAB in wealth management, and then founded Nabtrade — NAB's online trading platform. He built Nabtrade from an idea on a whiteboard into a $40 billion platform over seven years, winning multiple innovation awards along the way.

Building inside a major bank taught Nathan two things. First, it's possible to build innovative products within heavily regulated environments — you just need to know how to navigate the compliance landscape without letting it kill the speed of execution. Second, there's a ceiling. At some point, the bank's priorities diverge from the product's potential, and the bureaucracy wins. That tension is what ultimately pushed Nathan to start Athena, where the product vision isn't competing with a hundred other strategic priorities for board attention.

Michael Starkey: From Co-Founding iSelect to Co-Founding Athena

Michael Starkey brings a different but equally relevant background. He co-founded iSelect, one of Australia's most recognisable comparison platforms, before spending seven years at NAB in personal banking. He also sat on the board of the Australian Payments Council and was a former director of the New Payments Platform — Australia's real-time payments network.

That combination is rare. Michael understands what it takes to build a consumer-facing business from zero (iSelect), how large banks operate internally (NAB), and how payments infrastructure works at a national level (NPP). For a company trying to disrupt home lending, that's an unusually well-matched skill set. In the conversation, Michael talks about what it means to build a fintech that has to interact with the very institutions it's competing against — because when your business depends on wholesale funding markets and securitisation, the banks are simultaneously your competitors and your counterparties.

What Athena's No-Fee Model Means for Australian Borrowers

The no-fee model isn't a marketing gimmick. It's a structural decision that forces discipline throughout the business. When you can't fall back on fee revenue to pad margins, every dollar of operating cost has to be justified by the value it creates for borrowers. That's why Athena invested heavily in building a digital platform that automates as much of the loan process as possible — reducing the per-loan cost of origination and servicing.

For borrowers, the practical impact is significant. On a $500,000 loan, the combination of lower rates and zero fees can save tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the loan and shave years off repayment timelines. Athena was recognised with back-to-back Finnies Emerging Fintech Organisation of the Year awards in 2019 and 2020, and Canstar's 2020 Innovation Excellence Award — validation from industry assessors, not just marketing teams.

Building a Fintech Inside a $1.7 Trillion Regulated Market

One of the most valuable parts of this conversation is how Nathan and Michael think about regulation. Too many fintech founders treat compliance as a tax on innovation. Athena's founders see it differently — regulatory approval is a competitive moat. Once you've done the hard work of getting licensed and building the systems to maintain compliance, it becomes significantly harder for the next entrant to follow.

That doesn't mean it's easy. Home lending sits under some of the most complex regulation in Australian financial services, spanning APRA, ASIC, and responsible lending obligations. Nathan and Michael discuss how they've built compliance into the platform architecture rather than bolting it on as an afterthought — an approach that scales far better as loan volumes grow.

The broader lesson for any founder building in regulated markets: the regulation isn't the obstacle. It's the filter. The founders who figure out how to move fast within the constraints are the ones who build durable businesses.

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