Dubai-based AI lab Smart Bricks has secured US$5 million in a pre-seed round led by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Founded in 2024 by Mohamed Mohamed, the company aims to democratize real estate investing with an advanced AI-driven platform. This capital will accelerate its mission to make property investment simpler and more profitable for both individual and institutional clients worldwide.
Bridging the Institutional-Retail Divide
Founder Mohamed Mohamed, a veteran of firms like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, identified a major gap in real estate investment tools. He observed that large institutions utilize sophisticated data systems, while individual investors rely on fragmented information and intuition. Smart Bricks was created to bridge this divide by providing institutional-grade analytical power to a broader audience.
Mohamed describes the typical retail investor experience as "flying blind," lacking a structured framework for making high-stakes decisions. The platform addresses this by offering a systematic approach to evaluating opportunities, pricing risk, and defining exit strategies. It provides the disciplined system for thinking about data that has long been exclusive to institutional players.
An AI-Powered Investment Co-Pilot
The Smart Bricks platform leverages agentic AI to analyze over a million data points, covering everything from market dynamics to regulatory changes. It automates the entire investment lifecycle, including valuation, underwriting, due diligence, and post-transaction management. This end-to-end system ranks opportunities by expected risk-adjusted return, streamlining the decision-making process for users.
Emphasizing user control, the platform is designed to augment investor judgment rather than replace it. Its proprietary "Smart Bricks Score" offers a transparent view of an asset's potential, clearly showing the inputs behind the analysis. This approach ensures users understand the reasoning, allowing them to make informed decisions with confidence and full authority.
Strategic Backing for Global Ambition
The new capital will fuel the company's expansion beyond its current markets in the U.S., U.K., and UAE. Funds are also earmarked for advancing the product's AI infrastructure and autonomous reasoning capabilities. This investment provides the necessary resources for Smart Bricks to build a truly global platform for real estate intelligence and execution.
The support from a16z and other key investors provides more than just capital, offering crucial mentorship on product strategy and global expansion. Access to their network of experienced founders helps benchmark the company against the industry's best. This strategic guidance is vital for navigating localization challenges and scaling the platform's ambitious vision.
A User-Driven Path Forward
Smart Bricks is pursuing a user-driven expansion strategy, focusing on established global investment corridors like Dubai-London and Dubai-New York. By following existing capital flows, the company addresses real-world demand and reduces operational fragmentation. This approach ensures the platform's growth is directly aligned with investor needs.
This expansion model simultaneously builds a strong competitive moat centered on regulatory intelligence. As the platform incorporates the localized regulations of each new market, its defensibility grows. This focus on embedding regulatory awareness directly into the investment process is a key differentiator.
With its new funding and influential backers, Smart Bricks is positioned to reshape real estate investing. The company is building an essential AI infrastructure layer, aiming to make the asset class operate with the efficiency of modern financial markets. By providing transparent, data-driven insights, Smart Bricks is pioneering a new global standard for accessible property investment.