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, explaining 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., U.K., 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.”
The headline was updated to clarify that a16z speedrun led the round.