Proptech Startup Smart Bricks Raises $5M Pre-Seed Led By a16z

How Smart Bricks Is Closing Real Estate's Technology Gap

Smart Bricks has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding to bring Wall Street-caliber artificial intelligence tools to everyday real estate investors. Led by Andreessen Horowitz, the round backs a London and San Francisco-based startup building an autonomous platform that analyzes millions of data points to identify high-potential properties, forecast cash flows, and even manage transaction workflows. Founder Mohamed Mohamed left Boston Consulting Group in 2024 after witnessing a stark divide: while institutions deployed sophisticated computational models for property decisions, individual investors relied on WhatsApp threads and scattered PDFs to coordinate million-dollar deals.

Credit: Smart Bricks

From Institutional Insights to Democratized Intelligence

Mohamed's career at BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey exposed him to how elite financial firms treat real estate as a computational challenge rather than a purely intuitive bet. These organizations built proprietary data pipelines, internal valuation engines, and early AI systems to guide underwriting and capital allocation with surgical precision. Yet when Mohamed discussed investments with friends pursuing similar opportunities outside institutional walls, he discovered a startling reality. Critical documents lived in unsecured cloud folders. Deal terms were negotiated over messaging apps. Risk assessments happened through gut feeling rather than systematic modeling.

"There was no unified data layer, no consistent modeling, and no easy way to reason about risk, liquidity, or execution end to end," Mohamed explained. "Decisions involving millions of dollars were being made without anything resembling a modern intelligence stack." This disconnect became the catalyst for Smart Bricks—a platform designed to compress institutional analytical capabilities into an accessible interface for accredited investors, syndicators, and small fund managers.

The Autonomous Reasoning Engine Behind Every Recommendation

Unlike conventional proptech platforms that simply aggregate listings or display market statistics, Smart Bricks employs what its team calls an autonomous reasoning system. The technology doesn't just show available properties; it reverse-engineers investment theses by mapping each opportunity against an investor's stated objectives. Users input parameters like target cash-on-cash return, hold period, or risk tolerance. The AI then scans millions of public records, transaction histories, financing terms, and hyperlocal supply indicators to surface properties matching those criteria—not through keyword matching, but through probabilistic modeling.

The system runs automated valuation models calibrated to neighborhood-specific appreciation patterns. It projects cash-flow scenarios under varying occupancy and interest rate environments. Downside risk modeling simulates market corrections, vacancy spikes, or refinancing challenges. Most critically, the platform maintains a continuous feedback loop—updating projections in real time as new data enters the ecosystem, from municipal permit filings to commercial lease expirations. This transforms real estate analysis from a static spreadsheet exercise into a dynamic, living assessment.

Accelerating Transactions That Traditionally Take Weeks

One of Smart Bricks' most disruptive capabilities lies in compressing the transaction timeline. Traditional real estate deals involve layers of manual coordination: brokers sourcing comparables, attorneys drafting purchase agreements, analysts verifying rent rolls, and lenders underwriting debt packages. This workflow routinely spans three to six weeks even for straightforward acquisitions. Smart Bricks deploys specialized AI agents to handle discrete phases of this process—generating term sheets aligned with market standards, flagging title irregularities in preliminary reports, and pre-populating financing applications with verified data points.

These agents don't replace human professionals but augment their productivity. Brokers receive AI-prepared deal memos with embedded risk assessments. Attorneys get clause recommendations based on jurisdiction-specific precedents. Lenders access standardized financial projections formatted to their requirements. Early users report cutting preliminary due diligence from 18 days to under 72 hours while reducing documentation errors by an estimated 60 percent. The platform maintains full audit trails for compliance, ensuring every AI-generated suggestion remains transparent and reviewable by human stakeholders.

Why a16z Bet Early on This Proptech Vision

Andreessen Horowitz's leadership of this pre-seed round signals growing institutional confidence in AI-native real estate infrastructure. The firm has quietly built a thesis around "vertical AI"—specialized models trained on domain-specific data rather than generic large language models repurposed for industry tasks. Real estate represents a particularly compelling vertical: fragmented data sources, high transaction values, and historically slow technology adoption create fertile ground for disruption.

Smart Bricks' approach aligns with a16z's focus on foundational data layer development. Rather than building another marketplace or listing aggregator, the startup is constructing what amounts to an operating system for property intelligence—normalizing disparate municipal records, MLS feeds, and financing databases into a coherent analytical substrate. This infrastructure play could eventually support everything from fractional ownership platforms to climate resilience scoring for commercial assets. For a firm that backed early-stage bets in fintech infrastructure before those categories matured, Smart Bricks represents a similar foundational opportunity in physical asset management.

Building Trust Through Transparent AI Decision-Making

A persistent challenge for AI in high-stakes financial decisions involves explainability. Investors rightly hesitate to act on algorithmic recommendations they cannot interrogate. Smart Bricks addresses this through layered transparency features embedded directly into its interface. Every property recommendation includes an expandable "reasoning trail" showing which data points most influenced the assessment—whether proximity to new transit infrastructure, historical rent growth in the submarket, or anomalous seller motivation signals detected in public records.

The platform also quantifies its own uncertainty. When data gaps exist—such as incomplete renovation histories for older buildings—the system explicitly flags confidence intervals rather than presenting speculative figures as fact. This calibrated honesty builds user trust more effectively than overconfident projections. Early feedback from beta testers, including several family offices and real estate syndicators, emphasizes this transparency as a primary differentiator versus black-box analytics tools they previously evaluated.

Scaling Intelligence Across Asset Classes

With fresh capital secured, Smart Bricks plans to expand beyond its initial focus on multifamily residential assets in major U.S. and U.K. markets. The roadmap includes modules for commercial office analysis—particularly relevant as hybrid work reshapes space demand—and industrial logistics properties benefiting from e-commerce tailwinds. Longer term, Mohamed envisions applying the same reasoning architecture to cross-border investment scenarios, where currency fluctuations, regulatory variations, and tax implications compound analytical complexity.

The team is also exploring integration with blockchain-based title systems emerging in select jurisdictions. While still nascent, these digital registries could provide Smart Bricks with real-time ownership verification and encumbrance data—further compressing due diligence cycles. Crucially, the company remains asset-class and geography agnostic in its core mission: ensuring that analytical sophistication no longer serves as a barrier separating institutional and individual investors.

Real Estate's Intelligence Inflection Point

The $5 million raise arrives as the proptech sector undergoes a strategic pivot. After years of venture capital flowing toward transactional marketplaces and iBuying models, attention is shifting toward infrastructure-layer innovations that enhance decision quality rather than simply speeding up deal flow. Smart Bricks embodies this evolution—prioritizing depth of insight over breadth of listings.

For Mohamed, success isn't measured by transaction volume processed through the platform but by the quality of capital allocation it enables. "We're not trying to make real estate investing faster," he noted. "We're trying to make it smarter. When an individual investor can access the same analytical rigor as a billion-dollar fund, markets become more efficient, capital flows to better uses, and wealth creation becomes more meritocratic." In an asset class where information asymmetry has long dictated outcomes, that vision represents more than product innovation—it signals a fundamental rebalancing of opportunity.