Smart Bricks Raises $5M to Bring AI Agents and Institutional-Grade Insights to Real Estate

Proptech startup Smart Bricks raises $5 million pre-seed led by a16z | TechCrunch

For much of his career, Mohamed Mohamed worked at institutions -- BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey -- all of whom, he said, "treated real estate as a computational problem." "They had proprietary data pipelines, internal valuation models, simulation tools, and increasingly, early AI systems supporting underwriting and capital allocation," he told TechCrunch of how these firms analyzed property investments. But he knew that regular people who also invested in real estate didn't have access to such advanced tools. His friends were coordinating deals on WhatsApp or storing critical information in PDFs. "There was no unified data layer, no consistent modeling, and no easy way to reason about risk, liquidity, or execution end to end," Mohamed continued. "Decisions involving millions of dollars were being made without anything resembling a modern intelligence stack. In 2024, he left his job at Boston Consulting Group to strike out on his own. He founded Smart Bricks, an AI-powered proptech that helps investors find high-quality real estate investments. The company is based in London and San Francisco. The product analyzes millions of public and proprietary data points across areas like pricing, liquidity, transaction history, supply, and financing terms. Mohamed said it has an autonomous reasoning system that, rather than simply showing available real estate deals, can map to the expected outcome of a deal using automated valuation models, cash-flow forecasting, downside risk modeling, and market reasoning. Smart Bricks AI tools can also help complete the transaction workflow, which usually takes lawyers, analysts, and brokers weeks to complete on their own, letting a person use AI agents to handle it all. Even after a deal has been brokered, Smart Bricks uses fresh data to continuously update the deal, monitor performance, simulate refinancing, and recommend actions as the market changes. The company announced Tuesday a $5 million pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Others in the round include South Loop Ventures, Cornerstone VC, Techstars, and angel investors from OpenAI, Airbnb, Anthropic, Blackstone, and DeepMind. The startup is also currently partaking in a16z's prestigious Speedrun program. Mohamed met the team at a16z last year while exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt. At the time, he said, the company was still under the radar, but the investment from a16z has allowed them to scale. The fresh capital will be used to expand the product's infrastructure into additional markets (right now it just operates in the U.S., UK, and the UAE, the latter of which is Mohamed's home country). The money will also go toward product advancement. Mohamed said the last wave of proptech didn't focus enough on the sector's true bottleneck: cognition and execution. "Real estate transactions are slow and opaque because the reasoning lives in people's heads and the process spans too many disconnected systems," he said, adding that the company is betting that the next era of proptech looks like what happened in the public markets -- "intelligence layers, automated execution, and continuous decision-making powered by software," he continued. "Smart Bricks is building the AI infrastructure that allows real estate to operate more like a modern financial system, even across borders," Mohamed said Others in this space include reAlpha and RoofStock. Mohammed said Smart Bricks is different because others are building on top of a tech stack, but this product has built the stack itself. "We're closer to what Bloomberg did for public markets or what algorithmic trading platforms did for equities than to a consumer property portal," he said. "The goal is not to show more options, but to enable better outcomes through autonomous reasoning systems."

VCs back Smart Bricks' plan to automate real estate investing with AI agents - SiliconANGLE

VCs back Smart Bricks' plan to automate real estate investing with AI agents Artificial intelligence agents are coming to the real estate industry. A startup called Smart Bricks Real Estate LLC has just raised $5 million in pre-seed funding to develop autonomous reasoning agents that can help investors to identify, evaluate and acquire high-performing real estate assets without spending endless hours searching and struggling with due diligence. Today's round was led by the prominent venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and saw participation from a host of other backers. They included Techstars, 500 Global, Cornerstone, South Loop Ventures, Harvard Business School Alumni Angels and Centro Ventures, plus angel investors from AI powerhouses OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC. Smart Bricks founder and Chief Executive Mohamed Mohamed says real estate investing is ripe for agentic automation because it's the only trillion-dollar asset class that doesn't already have its own AI-native computing stack. While investors in the stock market are crunching through millions of data points using AI tools, most real estate financiers are still tapping away at calculators. "Most individual investors are still operating with PDFs, WhatsApp threads and incomplete data, and they lack visibility into the opaque fee structures in real estate," he said. "Institutions have proprietary data, AI underwriting and benefit from integrated execution, but everyone else is still flying blind." Smart Bricks aims to change that dynamic. It's building an AI infrastructure layer for real estate investing that taps into more than 1 million public and proprietary data feeds. Its autonomous agents will continuously analyze these feeds to assess the state of supply in key markets, as well as other key metrics such as pricing, liquidity, regulation and risk. By crunching this data, Smart Bricks' agents can provide investors with a complete picture of the most rewarding opportunities, based on current market dynamics. The platform considers more than 1,000 meaningful variables to rank real estate assets by their expected risk-adjusted return, and to make life easier for investors, it will only surface the top 0.1% within the area they're looking for. By eliminating the less desirable properties, it means investors only need to consider the most compelling opportunities, and once they've made a decision, Smart Bricks will streamline the transactional side too. In addition to its AI analysts, it has built agents that automate workflows including valuation, underwriting, due diligence, negotiation and financing to help transactions close more rapidly. Mohamed said Smart Bricks gives investors the same kinds of ranked opportunities, real-time intelligence and execution workflows that were previously available only to the world's biggest private equity and institutional real estate funds. "Investors in public markets already expect instant insights, scenario analysis and AI-driven recommendations," he said. "We bring that same level of speed, intelligence and confidence to global real estate, allowing capital to move with institutional precision across borders." Smart Bricks is bringing a much-needed dose of automation to one of the world's largest and most complex asset classes. Real estate's investment infrastructure is remarkably archaic compared to that of public markets, resulting in lost opportunities and higher risks for the vast majority of investors. With its AI-native infrastructure layer, Smart Bricks promises to level the playing field by helping regular investors move away from a reliance on incomplete data and eliminate human bias from the critical screening phase. Mohamed believes agentic automation in real estate investing will trigger a profound shift in global capital allocation, increasing market liquidity and compressing the timeline for real estate transactions. "Capital and talent have already gone global, but the tooling for real-estate investing has not," he said. "Smart Bricks is building the intelligence layer that finally allows real estate to operate at the speed, transparency and scale modern markets demand."