In Fall 2025, Lance Yan became the fastest student in University of Waterloo’s history to get flown out to San Francisco by a venture capital firm to raise venture funding.
Lance Yan is the founder of Clice, which describes as “Cursor for mortgage brokers.” It’s an agentic CRM for mortgage brokers and loan officers to handle communications.
Many people told Lance to drop out of college, take money from investors, and just build. Lance said, “I’ll drop out when I feel like it.”
Lance also launched Rate My Company, a public website that collects preference data from users who choose between two companies “Which company would you rather work at?” and ranks the companies into tiers on a Company Leaderboard. The site got 40K+ users and 2.5M+ votes within 48 hours of launch on October 19, 2025.
On October 26, 2025, Lance announced via LinkedIn that he has joined Kalshi as a Software Engineer (Builder). Kalshi is the first US federally regulated exchange where you can trade on the outcome of any event.
Early Life: Coding, Minecraft, and SWE Internships
Lance was born in Beijing, China, and his family immigrated when he was three years old and he grew up in Vancouver, CA. His parents enrolled him into an after school programming class at 5 years old where he learned to use Scratch. By the age of 8, Lance learned python and he built games. Once he learned HTML and started doing website development, he became obsessed and made hundreds of websites. He also got into pokemon cards.
Lance built his first business through Minecraft when he was 11 years old. He ran a guild in Skyblock and PiePixel and he started selling game items. Players would chat through Discord and send money via PayPal, and altogether Lance made $2000. Throughout middle school, Lance also made money coding random side projects.
In 10th grade, Lance started a social media marketing agency for small businesses. He would go into local businesses like restaurants and car washes and ask if they had social media accounts or needed content made.
During high school, Lance did three software engineering internships. He worked for two smaller companies and interned with his school’s computer science teacher’s stealth startup.
College: Waterloo, Startups, Venture Capital, and San Francisco
At age 18, Lance got right into Waterloo to study computer science. During the first semester of his undergraduate career, he knew he wanted to build a startup, so he started Clice, which he describes as “Cursor for Mortgage Brokers.” It’s an agentic CRM for mortgage brokers and loan officers to handle communications.
Clice is now backed by angels from Y Combinator, a16z, Soma Capital, UWaterloo's Velocity Incubator & Fund, and Lance received a $14,000 grant from Entrepreneurs First.
Many people told Lance to drop out of college, take money from investors, and just build. Lance said, “I’ll drop out when I feel like it.”
Clice: Why build a tool for the lending industry?
Lance says that if you consider the group of smart people building software companies, not many people are going to choose this area because it’s unfamiliar, so it’s an untapped market with estimated TAM (total addressable market) is $12 Trillion.
“The CRM is just the wedge. The whole process is so flawed,” said Lance. “I just want to be someone who has a great impact. Everybody needs a home, and I could get people by making the process easier.”
There is a YC company that is building software to replace mortgage brokers, but Lance disagreed with replacing humans in the process of buying a home. Lance says that he would rather a reliable human guide him through the purchase of his first home than an AI bot.
Clice will automate the manual and repetitive workflows that slow down mortgage professionals, from document intake and verification to stakeholder communication, follow-ups, and status tracking.
“We’re building for brokers, loan officers, and lenders. Clice acts as an AI teammate that understands the entire lending process end-to-end. It integrates directly with SMS, email, and lending systems to handle the operational load, so humans can focus on relationships and closing deals,” said Lance.
Getting in Touch with Lance and Clice
Right now, Clice remains a 1-person company while Lance is also employed as a Software Engineer (Builder) at Kalshi.
The best way to contact Lance is to reach out via email / LinkedIn / Twitter DM.
Lance’s personal website https://www.lanceyan.tech/
Lance’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lance-yan/
Lace’s Twitter https://x.com/cnnguan
Lance’s Github https://github.com/lance116
Lance’s Email [email protected]