UAE based proptech startup Smart Bricks is scaling its AI powered real estate investment platform after securing $5 million in pre seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, positioning itself as an infrastructure layer for global property investing.
In a notable development for the region’s proptech landscape, UAE based startup Smart Bricks has secured $5 million in a pre seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) through its Speedrun program. The round also included participation from Techstars, 500 Global, Cornerstone VC, South Loop Ventures, Harvard Business School Alumni Angels, and Cento Ventures, alongside angel investors with backgrounds at OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Airbnb, and Blackstone, according to reporting by TechCrunch that detailed the breadth of backers supporting the deal.
Founded in 2024 by Mohamed Mohamed, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree with prior experience at BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Boston Consulting Group, Smart Bricks is building what it describes as an AI native infrastructure layer for real estate investing. As outlined in his Forbes Middle East profile, Mohamed has positioned the company around automating complex investment workflows that traditionally require teams of analysts, brokers, and legal advisors.
The platform processes more than one million proprietary and public data feeds, using agentic AI to continuously assess supply, pricing, liquidity, regulation, and risk across multiple markets, a capability that the company highlighted in a Zawya report covering the funding announcement. This data layer underpins Smart Bricks’ broader ambition to standardize and accelerate how real estate deals are sourced, evaluated, and executed.
Smart Bricks says its system surfaces only the top 0.1% of properties by expected risk adjusted return while automating up to 99% of the investment workflow, from valuation and underwriting to due diligence, negotiation, financing, and post-transaction support, as detailed in the same Zawya coverage. The company claims this compresses processes that typically take three to six months into a matter of minutes, effectively creating an AI native operating system for real estate acquisition and ownership.
The platform is designed to serve both retail and institutional investors deploying capital across markets such as Dubai, London, New York, Miami, and major U.S. cities. Rather than operating as a traditional marketplace or broker network, Smart Bricks is positioning itself as the underlying AI infrastructure layer that ranks opportunities, delivers real time market intelligence, and executes workflows at a level comparable to institutional real estate funds, according to Zawya’s analysis of the startup’s model.
Smart Bricks has already gained external recognition, being named one of TechCrunch’s Top 200 startups globally and listed among Onstage Europe’s Top 20 startups in Europe, milestones also referenced in Zawya’s coverage. The company is additionally an alumnus of programs such as Google AI First, Microsoft GrowthX, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund (MBRIF), and NVIDIA Inception, signaling early institutional support within the innovation ecosystem.
With the new capital, Smart Bricks plans to scale its AI driven underwriting and execution capabilities, expand market coverage, and deepen its data infrastructure across key global real estate hubs. The company has framed its broader goal as bringing the speed, transparency, and decision-making confidence of public markets into global real estate, enabling capital to move across borders with greater precision.
