Rocket Companies, a fintech company with mortgage, real estate, and personal finance businesses, is starting to see the payoff from its generative AI efforts as well as a bet on AWS’s Amazon Bedrock.
In 2024 the company reported first-quarter revenue of $1.4 billion and net income of $291 million. The first quarter topped Wall Street’s expectations as well as the company’s internal guidance. On an earnings conference call, Rocket CEO Varun Krishna (right), formerly an executive at Intuit, PayPal, Groupon, and Microsoft, said the company is taking share, focusing on what it can control as interest rates and the mortgage market ebb and flow and investing in artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the business.
Rocket Companies’ journey to becoming an AI-driven mortgage and lending disruptor has been a long one. The company started as Rock Financial in 1985; created Mortgage In A Box, a mail-in mortgage application, in 1996; expanded into loans and became Quicken Loans in 1999; became the largest provider in FHA loans in 2014; became the largest residential mortgage lender in 2017; and went public in 2020. Throughout its history, Rocket has had to manage through real estate and lending boom-and-bust cycles.
