Smart Bricks Secures $5M Pre-Seed Funding from a16z to Democratize AI-Powered Real Estate Investment Intelligence

Mohamed Mohamed, leveraging his extensive experience at tier-one financial institutions including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey, identified a critical gap in the real estate investment ecosystem. Throughout his career, he observed how these organizations approached real estate as a computational challenge, deploying proprietary data pipelines, internal valuation models, simulation frameworks, and early-stage AI systems to support underwriting and capital allocation decisions.

However, Mohamed recognized that retail real estate investors lacked access to comparable sophisticated tooling. Individual investors were coordinating transactions through messaging platforms like WhatsApp and managing critical deal information in static PDF documents. "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."

In 2024, Mohamed departed from Boston Consulting Group to launch Smart Bricks, an AI-powered proptech platform designed to democratize access to institutional-grade real estate investment analysis. The company operates from dual headquarters in London and San Francisco.

Core Technology Infrastructure

The platform's architecture processes millions of public and proprietary data points across multiple vectors including:

Smart Bricks implements an autonomous reasoning system that transcends traditional property listing aggregation. Rather than simply surfacing available deals, the platform maps expected outcomes through:

The platform's AI agents streamline the entire transaction workflow, automating processes that traditionally require weeks of coordination between lawyers, analysts, and brokers. Post-transaction, the system continuously ingests fresh data to update valuations, monitor asset performance, simulate refinancing scenarios, and generate actionable recommendations as market conditions evolve.

Funding and Strategic Backing

Smart Bricks announced a $5 million pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The investment syndicate includes South Loop Ventures, Cornerstone VC, Techstars, and angel investors from OpenAI, Airbnb, Anthropic, Blackstone, and DeepMind. The startup is currently participating in a16z's selective Speedrun accelerator program.

Mohamed's connection with a16z originated at a startup exhibition event, where the company was still operating in stealth mode. The institutional backing has enabled significant scaling opportunities.

Capital Deployment Strategy

The funding will support two primary initiatives:

Market Positioning and Competitive Differentiation

Mohamed argues that previous proptech waves failed to address the sector's fundamental constraint: cognition and execution capabilities. "Real estate transactions are slow and opaque because the reasoning lives in people's heads and the process spans too many disconnected systems," he stated.

The company's thesis mirrors the transformation observed in public equity markets—intelligence layers, automated execution, and continuous decision-making powered by software infrastructure. "Smart Bricks is building the AI infrastructure that allows real estate to operate more like a modern financial system, even across borders," Mohamed emphasized.

While competitors such as reAlpha and RoofStock operate in the AI-powered real estate space, Mohamed positions Smart Bricks as fundamentally different in architectural approach. Rather than building applications on top of existing technology stacks, Smart Bricks has engineered its own foundational infrastructure.

"We're closer to what Bloomberg did for public markets or what algorithmic trading platforms did for equities than to a consumer property portal," Mohamed explained. "The goal is not to show more options, but to enable better outcomes through autonomous reasoning systems."