Proptech startup Smart Bricks raises $5M pre-seed led by a16z Speedrun

For much of his professional journey, Mohamed Mohamed worked at major financial institutions — including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey — where, he said, real estate was approached as a computational challenge.

“They had proprietary data pipelines, internal valuation models, simulation tools, and increasingly, early AI systems supporting underwriting and capital allocation,” Mohamed explained in an interview, describing how those firms evaluated property investments.

At the same time, he observed that individual investors lacked access to comparable tools—friends who were active in real estate coordinated transactions via WhatsApp and stored key documents as PDFs.

“There was no unified data layer, no consistent modelling, and no easy way to reason about risk, liquidity, or execution end to end,” Mohamed said. “Decisions involving millions of dollars were being made without anything resembling a modern intelligence stack.”

In 2024, Mohamed left his role at Boston Consulting Group to launch his own venture. He founded Smart Bricks, an AI-powered proptech startup that helps investors identify high-quality real estate opportunities. The company operates out of London and San Francisco.

Smart Bricks’ platform processes millions of public and proprietary data points, analysing variables including pricing trends, liquidity, transaction histories, supply conditions, and financing structures.

According to Mohamed, the system incorporates an autonomous reasoning engine that goes beyond listing available properties. Instead, it maps potential deal outcomes using automated valuation models, cash-flow projections, downside risk assessments, and broader market analysis.

The company’s AI tools are also designed to streamline the transaction workflow—a process that traditionally requires weeks of work from lawyers, analysts, and brokers. Through AI agents, users can manage the process more efficiently. Even after a deal is completed, Smart Bricks continues to ingest updated data to monitor performance, model refinancing scenarios, and recommend adjustments as market conditions evolve.

On Tuesday, the company announced that it had secured $5 million in pre-seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Additional participants in the round include South Loop Ventures, Cornerstone VC, Techstars, and angel investors affiliated with OpenAI, Airbnb, Anthropic, Blackstone, and DeepMind. Smart Bricks is also participating in a16z’s Speedrun program.

Mohamed said he first connected with the a16z team last year. At that time, the startup had limited visibility, but the backing from Andreessen Horowitz has helped accelerate its growth.

The newly raised capital will be used to expand the platform’s infrastructure into new markets. At present, Smart Bricks operates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed’s home country. Funding will also support further product development.

Mohamed believes earlier waves of proptech overlooked a critical constraint in the industry: 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. He added that the company is betting the next phase of proptech will mirror the transformation seen in public markets, driven by “intelligence layers, automated execution, and continuous decision-making powered by software.”

“Smart Bricks is building the AI infrastructure that allows real estate to operate more like a modern financial system, even across borders,” Mohamed said.

Other companies operating in this space include reAlpha and RoofStock. Mohamed argued that Smart Bricks differentiates itself by building its own underlying technology stack rather than layering tools on top of an existing one.

“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.”