Smart Bricks Lands $5M to Revolutionise AI-driven Real Estate Investing

Mohammed Fathy

Last updated 11-02-2026

4 min

Dubai proptech startup Smart Bricks raised $5 million in pre-seed funding.

It aims to compress property deals from months into minutes.

Its AI analyses “one million data feeds” to rank top investments.

The platform targets cross-border markets like Dubai, London and New York.

Backed by a16z and others, it promises institutional-grade precision.

Dubai’s proptech scene has just welcomed a fresh injection of capital. Smart Bricks, a startup building what it calls an AI-native infrastructure layer for real estate investing, has secured $5 million in a pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Speedrun programme. The round also drew participation from funds and angel investors across the US, Europe and the Middle East.

Founded in 2024, Smart Bricks is attempting something rather ambitious: compressing the real estate investment process from months into minutes. Traditionally, sourcing, underwriting and closing a property deal can drag on for three to six months. It’s often, frankly, a bit of a faff — endless documents, calls, back-and-forths. The company says its agentic AI systems can handle everything from identifying opportunities to due diligence and even post-transaction support, automating up to 99% of the workflow.

That’s a bold promise.

Real estate, despite being a trillion-dollar asset class, still runs largely on fragmented data and human judgement. According to the company, there are more than 100 million scattered data sources globally, and over 1,000 relevant variables for evaluating a single asset. Yet many investors still lean on a couple of data points and broker narratives. Mohamed Mohamed, founder and CEO of Smart Bricks, argues that institutions have long enjoyed proprietary data systems and AI-driven underwriting tools, while individual and cross-border investors are “effectively flying blind,” often juggling PDFs, WhatsApp threads and opaque fee structures.

His view is that Smart Bricks bridges this divide. The platform reportedly ingests more than one million proprietary and public data feeds, analysing supply, pricing, liquidity, regulation and risk across global markets. It then surfaces what it considers the top 0.1% of properties by expected risk-adjusted return. From there, investors receive ranked opportunities and real-time intelligence, alongside execution tools designed to mirror the sophistication of institutional funds.

It’s not positioning itself as another property marketplace or broker, but rather as the intelligence layer behind modern real estate investing. Markets in focus include Dubai, London, New York, Miami and other major US cities — locations where cross-border capital is constantly on the move.

I’ve spoken to many founders across the MENA region who say property remains one of the hardest sectors to “digitise properly”. There are shiny portals, yes, but the deeper plumbing — underwriting, cross-border compliance, capital structuring — is still messy. So I can see why some investors are chuffed to bits about a system that promises institutional-grade precision without building a full in-house AI team.

Smart Bricks has already caught attention beyond the funding round. It has been recognised by TechCrunch as one of the Top 200 startups globally and named among the Top 20 startups in Europe by Onstage. The company counts Andreessen Horowitz, Techstars, 500 Global, Cornerstone VC, South Loop Ventures and Harvard Business School Alumni Angels among its backers, alongside angel investors from firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Airbnb and Blackstone. It is also an alumnus of programmes including Google AI First, Microsoft GrowthX, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund (MBRIF) Accelerator and NVIDIA Inception.

The MBRIF Innovation Accelerator, in particular, appears to have played a role in formalising the startup’s growth strategy last year, connecting it with mentorship and national innovation networks as it moved towards scaling.

Mohamed himself is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree. Before launching Smart Bricks, he worked across strategy, AI and investment roles at Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Company, advising governments and financial institutions. Earlier in his career, he held investment positions at Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, and later worked with venture firms Atomico and Greycroft. He is also an angel investor in more than 30 startups.

“Capital and talent have already gone global; the tooling for real-estate investing has not,” Mohamed has said, outlining his belief that the sector needs to catch up with the speed and transparency seen in public markets.

On the flip side, real estate is famously complex, localised and regulation-heavy. Building a truly global, AI-driven operating system for it is no small task. I reckon execution will be everything here. Still, if Smart Bricks can deliver even part of what it outlines, it could make cross-border property investing feel less like navigating in the dark and more like operating with the lights fully on.

And for founders watching from across MENA, there’s another takeaway. Global capital is clearly paying attention to startups that tackle old industries with serious tech depth. That, in itself, is spot on — and maybe a sign that the region’s proptech ambitions are only just getting started.

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