Tellus is a real estate and financial technology company built on a simple structural observation: real estate generates some of the most consistent economics in American finance, but the tools and systems around it remain fragmented, expensive, and difficult to access for everyday people.
The company operates three business lines — cash accounts for savers, property management software for real estate investors, landlords, and tenants, and business-purpose residential lending — all from a single platform, all grounded in real estate. Each line serves a different need. Together, they make the company work.
Tellus is not a bank and is not FDIC-insured. It is a profitable, growing fintech company, funded by a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (November 2022), and its revenues are driven primarily through its real estate lending line.
What Users Actually Do on Tellus
A lot of fintech explainers describe business models. This one starts with what happens when someone opens the app — because the product only matters if people use it.
Savers on Tellus set goals, claim Boosts, take quizzes that improve their personal financial knowledge, and earn rewards that are paid and compound daily. Behavioral research shows that people who attach their money to a stated purpose are more likely to hit their financial goals. The Tellus app makes it easy to create those buckets: an emergency fund, a vacation, a down payment. Users who engage consistently — logging in, completing daily quizzes, activating Boosts, building streaks — see the impact in their account every day. The design is built to reward savers based on their activity with a tight feedback loop: Save. Engage. See the progress. Feel the progress. Keep going.
That design philosophy exists for a reason. Fewer than half of Americans have enough liquidity to cover a $1,000 emergency expense. Twenty-four percent have no emergency savings at all. And the national personal saving rate — currently around 4.6% — is misleading on its own. A joint study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis found that the bottom half of the American income distribution has negative net savings. The aggregate rate is pulled up almost entirely by high earners at the top. For tens of millions of households, the savings rate is not low. It is zero — or worse.
The gap between income and financial resilience, for most people, is not about access to products. It is about building the habit of saving in the first place. Tellus built its product mechanics around that problem: at a time when saving feels invisible and unrewarding, the Tellus app makes the act of building cash feel real, participatory, and worth showing up for.
Landlords and renters on Tellus use the free property management software to collect rent, track maintenance requests, store leases, and communicate with each other — all in one place. All of Tellus’s core property management features are delivered at no cost. The property owners and the landlords are the ones managing the property, making the decisions, and protecting their cash flow. Tellus gives them the software to do that efficiently and effectively, from a mobile app in their pocket.
To engage as a saver with Tellus you do not need to be a landlord or renter. And landlords do not have to save. Each product stands on its own. But both sit on the same platform and in the same app, for a reason — real estate is at the center of how most American families build long-term wealth, whether they are setting aside their first emergency fund or managing a rental portfolio. Imagine a young adult renter just starting out, saving from their first real paycheck. They pay their rent on Tellus and save on Tellus. Then they use Tellus to save for a down payment, buy their first home, and eventually, they trade up and turn that home into a rental managed on the same platform they started on. Tellus is designed so that wherever someone enters that wealth-building journey, the next step is already there.
How the Company Makes Money
Distinct from its consumer products, Tellus operates a real estate lending business. The company makes short-term loans — typically 12-month terms — against non-owner-occupied residential property. Borrowers are fix-and-flip operators, landlords pulling equity from rental properties, and developers doing small-scale residential construction. This is short-term business-purpose lending, not consumer mortgages.
The underwriting model evaluates the property itself — location, condition, value, rental income potential — rather than relying on consumer-focused borrower credit scores. Every loan is secured by a lien on residential real estate — physical, real houses. If a borrower defaults, the company can foreclose and recover the asset.
That lending model is in part fueled by the property management technology — better data and proprietary data means the company can more precisely judge its lending risk. That is how Tellus makes money. There are no hidden fees for users, no payment-for-order-flow revenue, no consumer arbitrage, no interchange income.
The People Who Built It
Tellus was founded in 2016 by Rocky Lee and T Zhu. They built genuinely impressive property management technology — the software landlords still use on the platform today — with real vision and meaningful technical depth.
Jeromee (JJ) Johnson joined in 2020 as CTO. He was semi-retired from a career spent working inside and scaling global financial markets, holding leadership roles at international exchange operators, MIAX and BATS (now CBOE). During his time running the Options Exchange at BATS Global Markets, JJ led the cross-industry obvious error and circuit breaker harmonization work following the 2010 Flash Crash. That impactful market structure work, creating alignment with both competitors like NYSE and NASDAQ and the regulators, at a time of intense scrutiny, took years of negotiation. But those rules remain the market-wide standard today.
Johnson found Tellus the way a good investor finds an undervalued asset: circumstance and pattern recognition. He searched “free property management” in the app store, discovered Tellus, tried it, and connected with the founders. He saw sophisticated technology, a real founding vision, and a company that needed an experienced operator to scale. He took that role and quickly evolved from CTO to become the person who sets the company’s strategy and drives its day-to-day operational execution. As he puts it: “In a startup, everybody has to be the CEO, everybody has to be the plumber.”
That background shows up in how Tellus operates. The company is built with systems that function reliably under pressure and scale without breaking — not with surface-level innovation and short-term growth tactics. It also shows up in the company’s relationship with regulators: compliance is treated as permanent infrastructure, not a temporary obstacle.
What exists today — the three-line integrated business, the path from startup to profitable company — is the product of that partnership. Founders who envisioned and created something worth building. An operator who knew how to shape it and scale it. That is how it is done.
Why Real Estate, and Why It Matters
The structural case for real estate as a foundation is well-documented. A landmark study published through the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco — covering 16 advanced economies and nearly 150 years of data — found that residential real estate has delivered total returns comparable to equities at significantly lower volatility. For a company building tools around long-term wealth creation, that finding is not trivia. It is the reason the entire business is built on a solid real estate foundation.
That foundation also explains why the lending business matters. The U.S. housing supply gap widened to an estimated 4.03 million homes in 2025, up from 3.8 million the year before. Building material costs have risen more than 40% since the onset of the pandemic. The National Association of Home Builders puts the increase in residential construction materials at 41.6%. That means persistent, structural demand for the kind of short-term residential lending Tellus does — capital for people buying, renovating, and building homes. The borrowers exist because the shortage exists. And the shortage is not a cycle. It is a structural deficit that every credible estimate measures in years, not months — one that millions of Americans feel every time they consider a move.
The structural problem runs parallel on the rental side. Nearly nine out of ten single-family rental homes in the United States are owned by individual investors — the mom-and-pop landlords who manage one, two, or a handful of properties. These small-scale landlords own more than a third of all rental housing units and their stock is, on average, more affordable for renters than institutionally owned properties. These mom-and-pop landlords are the backbone of the American rental market. But they operate largely without institutional-grade tools — managing leases, maintenance, and tenant communication with spreadsheets, text messages, and paper files. As corporate landlords scale up with dedicated technology, individual landlords need better software just to stay competitive and keep their properties in the housing supply. That is where Tellus’s property management platform sits.
Tellus is not chasing a rate cycle. It is solving structural problems across the real estate ecosystem — the housing supply gap, the affordability crisis, and the technology gap facing the landlords who provide much of America’s rental housing. Those problems are measured in decades. Tellus is a company built to last.
A Different Approach in a Crowded Market
The fintech landscape has increasingly leaned into high-risk, high-volatility products. Zero-commission brokerage accounts, crypto trading apps, zero-days-to-expiration options platforms marketed as empowerment tools, sports betting — each generates revenue when users transact, not when they build wealth.
Tellus has taken a fundamentally different approach: building financial tools grounded in real estate operations rather than speculative instruments. The goal is to give users tools that reward consistent financial behavior — saving regularly, managing properties effectively — rather than encouraging speculation.
If the word “fintech” triggers skepticism earned by Celsius, Voyager, Synapse, or FTX, that skepticism is reasonable. Those companies failed for specific, documented reasons: misuse of customer funds, fraud, lack of collateral, opaque business models. Tellus is built differently — the loans are short-term, the collateral is real property, the business model is transparent, and the company is profitable and scaling.
What Comes Next
Tellus is competing in a sector where profitability is uncommon. That profitability is a foundation, not an endpoint — it enables the company to invest in infrastructure, product development, and compliance without being constrained by external funding cycles.
The long-term vision is to keep building tools that make it easier for everyday people to save, manage property, and access lending — all powered by real estate, all delivered by a company that knows real estate and the financial markets from the inside.
Financial systems should work for more people, not just those who fit predefined categories. Tellus is built to make that idea a reality.
Tellus is not a bank. Tellus is not FDIC-insured.
Endnotes
¹ Bankrate, 2026 Emergency Savings Report (survey conducted May 2025; published February 2026). Fewer than half (47%) of Americans have sufficient liquidity to cover a $1,000 emergency expense; 24% have no emergency savings at all.https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/emergency-savings-report/
² U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Saving Rate (NIPA Table 2.6). The personal saving rate measures personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income. https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-saving-rate
³ U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics & Bureau of Economic Analysis, “The Polarization of Personal Saving” (2024). Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data matched to national accounts totals for 2004–2022, the study found that while aggregate saving was 3% of personal income in 2022, saving was negative for the bottom half of the income distribution. Expenditures exceeded income by more than double for the bottom 10%. https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2024/ec240050.htm
⁴ Jordà, Òscar, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, and Alan M. Taylor, “The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2017-25 (December 2017). Published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 134, Issue 3 (August 2019), pp. 1225–1298. The study compiled annual asset return data for equities, housing, bonds, and bills across 16 advanced economies over nearly 150 years and found that residential real estate delivered total returns comparable to equities with significantly lower volatility. SF Fed Working Paper:https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/working-papers/2017/12/the-rate-of-return-on-everything-1870-2015/Full PDF: https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2017-25.pdf Published version (QJE):https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/134/3/1225/5435538 NBER Working Paper No. w24112:https://www.nber.org/papers/w24112
⁵ Realtor.com, 2026 Housing Supply Gap Report (published March 3, 2026). The U.S. housing supply gap widened to an estimated 4.03 million homes in 2025, up from 3.8 million in 2024, as new construction fell short of household formation and pent-up demand persisted. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/housing-supply-gap-surpasses-4-million-homes-in-2025-as-construction-fails-to-keep-pace-with-demand-302701775.html
⁶ Associated Builders and Contractors analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index data (April 2025). Construction input prices sit more than 40% higher compared to February 2020.https://www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-materials-costs-rise-third-month-tariff-pressures/745225/ See also: Construction Dive, “5 years after COVID hit, contractors still wait for prices to come down” (March 11, 2025). Inputs to nonresidential construction sit approximately 40.5% above February 2020 levels. https://www.constructiondive.com/news/covid-impact-construction-prices-materials/742087/
⁷ National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), as cited by the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP): the cost of building materials has risen 41.6% since the COVID-19 pandemic, far outpacing overall inflation.https://nahrep.org/housinghub/2025/10/21/building-barriers-how-rising-construction-costs-impact-the-housing-affordability-crisis/
⁸ BatchData analysis via ResiClub (September 2025). Of 15.7 million single-family rental homes in the U.S., nearly nine out of ten are owned by individuals or families with a small number of properties. https://www.resiclubanalytics.com/p/mom-and-pop-landlords-still-dominate-the-single-family-rental-market-batchdata-finds
⁹ Urban Institute, “Exploring Mom-and-Pop Landlord Rentals” (ongoing research partnership with Avail). According to U.S. Census Bureau data, individual landlords owning 10 or fewer properties own more than a third of all rental housing units, and their housing stock is, on average, more affordable for renters. https://www.urban.org/projects/exploring-mom-and-pop-landlord-rentals
