Smart Bricks, a proptech startup headquartered between London and San Francisco, has secured a $5 million pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The financing includes participation from South Loop Ventures, Cornerstone VC, Techstars, and a roster of angel investors from OpenAI, Airbnb, Anthropic, Blackstone, and DeepMind. The company is also part of a16z’s Speedrun program, signaling strong conviction around its approach to AI-native real estate investing and execution.
Founded by Mohamed Mohamed, who previously held roles at BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Boston Consulting Group, Smart Bricks is building an AI platform that identifies and underwrites real estate opportunities, then helps close and monitor deals end to end. The product aggregates millions of public and proprietary data points across pricing, liquidity, transaction history, supply dynamics, and financing terms, layering in autonomous reasoning to recommend—and continuously adjust—investment strategies.
Inside Smart Bricks’ AI Stack for Real Estate Deals
Rather than functioning as a simple search engine for properties, Smart Bricks models expected deal outcomes. Its system blends automated valuation models, cash-flow projections, downside risk analysis, and market reasoning to produce scenario-based recommendations. The goal is to compress weeks of manual work done by lawyers, analysts, and brokers into a software-led workflow.
Once a target is identified, the platform’s agents coordinate due diligence, document parsing, and data checks, and can surface financing options based on current credit conditions. After closing, the software keeps portfolios “alive” by ingesting fresh data, monitoring performance, simulating refinancings, and proposing actions if markets, rents, or rates shift. Today, the company operates in the U.S., the UK, and the UAE, with plans to extend coverage.
Mohamed frames the product as an intelligence layer for private real estate markets—akin to how quant systems reshaped public-market workflows. He argues the bottleneck is no longer data availability alone, but the ability to reason over it and execute consistently across fragmented systems.
Why a16z Is Betting on Proptech Right Now
Real estate is the world’s largest asset class—valued at more than $300 trillion, according to Savills World Research—yet transactions remain slow, opaque, and highly manual. That friction-based status quo is costly: back-and-forth coordination, uneven data standards, and inconsistent underwriting extend cycles from weeks to months and raise execution risk.
At the same time, the market backdrop has sharpened investor focus on pricing and risk. Global commercial real estate investment volumes fell by roughly 45% year over year in 2023, per MSCI Real Assets, as rates rose and bid-ask spreads widened. In choppy conditions, tools that quantify liquidity and downside—and can act on those insights quickly—tend to gain share. PitchBook data shows venture activity in real estate tech cooled with the broader market, making notable early-stage bets like this one stand out.
a16z’s Speedrun participation suggests the firm sees a platform play: AI that not only sources deals but also standardizes underwriting logic and automates execution. If software can compress diligence timelines and reduce error rates even modestly, the compounding effect across portfolios could be significant.
Market Context and Competition in Proptech Today
Smart Bricks enters a space that includes players like reAlpha and Roofstock, which have popularized new distribution models and marketplace dynamics. The company argues its differentiation lies in building the data and decisioning stack itself—more Bloomberg than property portal—so that sourcing, underwriting, and closing live within one reasoning engine.
That vision faces real-world challenges: fragmented records, evolving regulations, and variable data quality across borders. Yet the timing is favorable. Institutional investors increasingly demand systematized underwriting, and JLL’s research has highlighted the acceleration of digital adoption across corporate real estate functions. If Smart Bricks can normalize inputs and governance—auditable models, versioned assumptions, and consistent cash-flow math—it could become embedded infrastructure rather than a point solution.
What the Funding Enables for Smart Bricks’ Next Phase
The new capital will expand Smart Bricks’ market coverage beyond its current U.S., UK, and UAE footprint, with investment into data ingestion pipelines, model robustness, and integrations with lenders and service providers. Expect emphasis on compliance features—identity verification, AML checks, document provenance—and on capabilities for cross-border flows, where currency, tax, and legal nuances complicate execution.
On the product side, the team is likely to deepen its autonomous agents for tasks like lease abstraction, rent roll analysis, contractor bid comparisons, and dynamic debt optimization as benchmarks move. The company also plans to bolster post-close asset management, using live inputs to trigger alerts and propose actions rather than static quarterly reports.
The Stakes for Real Estate as AI Shapes Investing
Even small accuracy gains can matter at scale. Shaving a few basis points of slippage on execution, or tightening valuation error bands by a few points, can change IRRs across a multi-asset portfolio. For smaller sponsors who still coordinate deals via email threads and PDFs, a unified decision-and-execution layer could be the difference between participating in competitive processes and watching from the sidelines.
Smart Bricks now has capital and a high-profile backer to pursue that thesis. The next test is proving that autonomous deal reasoning can generalize across geographies and asset types—delivering faster closes, cleaner audits, and better outcomes when markets are calm and when they are not.