- HEADLINE + INTRO
Smart Bricks Wants to Turn Property Deals Into Quant Trades — Here’s Why That Matters
Real estate has always behaved like a multi-trillion dollar market that’s run on email chains, Excel files, and gut feeling. Smart Bricks, a young proptech straddling London and San Francisco, is betting that this gap between asset size and technological sophistication is now intolerable — and that AI agents can close it. The startup’s new $5 million pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz is less about another flashy valuation, and more about a deeper question: what happens when institutional-grade analytics and automated execution reach everyone from small syndicates to cross-border investors?
This piece looks at what Smart Bricks is actually building, why a16z is leaning in so early, and what it signals for the next decade of property technology — especially in Europe.
- THE NEWS IN BRIEF
According to TechCrunch, Smart Bricks has raised a $5 million pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from South Loop Ventures, Cornerstone VC, Techstars and several well-known angel investors from OpenAI, Airbnb, Anthropic, Blackstone and DeepMind.
Founded in 2024 by Mohamed Mohamed, a former consultant and ex-BlackRock/Goldman/McKinsey operator, Smart Bricks develops an AI-powered platform for real estate investors. The product ingests millions of public and proprietary data points around pricing, liquidity, transaction history, supply and financing terms. It then uses automated valuation models, cash-flow and downside scenarios, and market reasoning to evaluate deals.
The company doesn’t stop at underwriting: its AI tools can help automate much of the transaction workflow and later monitor portfolio performance, simulate refinancing and recommend actions. Smart Bricks currently supports the U.S., UK and UAE markets. The startup is also part of a16z’s Speedrun program, and plans to use the capital to expand into more geographies and deepen the product.
- WHY THIS MATTERS
The core idea behind Smart Bricks is brutal in its simplicity: bring a hedge fund-style intelligence stack to an industry that still runs like a family office from the 1990s.
The winners, initially, are sophisticated but understaffed investors: family offices, small funds, syndicates, and high-net-worth individuals who don’t have internal quant teams. Today many of them coordinate via WhatsApp groups and PDFs — exactly the pain point Mohamed describes. If Smart Bricks can compress weeks of analyst work into hours, those players suddenly look far more competitive against big institutions.
Traditional intermediaries — brokers, junior analysts, even some lawyers — are the ones who should be nervous. The platform doesn’t simply surface listings; it tries to reason about risk, structure and execution. When an AI agent can draft term sheets, compare financing structures and flag legal anomalies based on patterns across thousands of past deals, the value of manual, one-off work drops.
This also changes the competitive landscape in proptech itself. The previous generation of startups mostly digitised discovery (marketplaces, listing portals) or digitised one step of the process (e-signatures, online mortgages). Smart Bricks is explicitly going after the cognitive bottleneck: the thinking and orchestration that happens between “interesting property” and “closed deal with an operating plan”. That’s a much more defensible layer than just another portal.
Of course, there are risks. Over-reliance on black-box models for valuation and risk can magnify systemic errors, especially in illiquid markets. And if access is priced high, this will not democratise real estate — it will simply supercharge those who are already capital-rich.
- THE BIGGER PICTURE
Smart Bricks slots neatly into three overlapping macro trends.
First, the “Bloomberg for X” wave. Over the last decade, every asset class — from private equity secondaries to carbon credits — has tried to build its own data and execution stack. Real estate has lagged because it is fragmented, jurisdiction-specific and full of unstructured data. The bet here is that large foundation models and better data pipelines finally make it feasible to treat property portfolios the way quants treat equities.
Second, the rise of AI agents, not just AI copilots. Many fintech and SaaS products now claim to use AI; most still rely on humans to orchestrate workflows. Smart Bricks is explicitly talking about autonomous reasoning systems that can carry a transaction from analysis through documentation and ongoing monitoring. Whether the reality matches the pitch is a separate question, but the direction is clear: software that doesn’t just assist humans, but acts on their behalf within constraints.
Third, the re-pricing of risk in a high-rate, post-zero-interest environment. With cheap money gone, underwriting matters again. Real estate investors are dealing with volatile financing costs, diverging regional markets and uncertain demand patterns (office vs. logistics vs. residential). Tools that continuously re-evaluate portfolio risk and suggest refinancings, exits or repositionings fit this macro context far better than the 2015-era crop of “Uber for property viewings” startups.
Competitors like Roofstock and reAlpha have already pushed into data-driven single-family rental investing and fractional ownership. What Smart Bricks is hinting at, though, is more akin to an infrastructure layer for professional investors, not a consumer-facing platform. If they’re closer to Bloomberg than to a listing site, the real rivals might end up being large asset managers’ in-house systems or vertical solutions from big banks, not other proptech startups.
- THE EUROPEAN / REGIONAL ANGLE
For European investors, the idea of an AI layer that treats real estate “like a modern financial system” is both attractive and fraught.
On the plus side, Europe’s property markets are famously fragmented — different languages, legal systems, land registries, tax regimes. Cross-border deals are expensive in terms of legal and cognitive overhead. A platform that can normalise data and reason about risk across the UK, EU and Middle East could lower barriers for European family offices that increasingly want global exposure but lack the teams of a Blackstone.
Regulation, however, will bite harder here than in the U.S. Any system operating in the EU that processes personal or transaction-level data will sit squarely under GDPR. If Smart Bricks begins to influence financing decisions at scale, there will be questions about explainability and bias — themes central to the EU AI Act. Real estate may not be covered like credit scoring, but regulators are unlikely to ignore algorithmic systems shaping access to housing or commercial space.
There is also a competitive question. Europe already has strong proptech players: Germany’s Hypoport in mortgage infrastructure, Scout24 and Idealista on the marketplace side, and a growing ecosystem in Berlin, London, Paris and the Nordics. If Smart Bricks is serious about being an infrastructure layer, it could become a partner to these incumbents — or a Trojan horse that gradually eats their higher-value analytics and workflow revenue.
Finally, Europe’s cultural bias toward caution in financial innovation means adoption may start with more adventurous hubs — London, Amsterdam, the Nordics — before spreading to more conservative markets like Germany or Southern Europe.
- LOOKING AHEAD
What happens next will depend on three things: data, trust and distribution.
Data is the hardest moat. To deliver on its promises, Smart Bricks needs deep, clean, continuously updated feeds: transaction records, listings, financing terms, zoning changes, even alternative data like footfall or mobility. Building these pipelines across multiple countries is expensive and slow. Expect the next 18–24 months to be about quietly stitching together partnerships with brokers, lenders, registries and data vendors.
Trust is the human bottleneck. Large deals will not close on the basis of an opaque “AI says yes”. The platform will need to show its work: scenario trees, sensitivity analyses, auditable assumptions. In Europe in particular, expect clients to demand strong governance features — approval workflows, model documentation, and the ability to override or constrain agents.
Distribution may be where a16z’s network really matters. Getting in early with a handful of influential funds and family offices can create a halo effect: if your peers underwrite with Smart Bricks, you at least need to benchmark against it. A logical medium-term step would be integrations with banking partners and custody/administration platforms, making Smart Bricks the analytical brain behind existing financial relationships.
The open questions are non-trivial. How will liability work if an AI-driven recommendation leads to a disastrous deal? Will regulators require some form of human-in-the-loop for high-value transactions? And will asset managers choose to license an external brain, or double down on their internal data science teams instead?
- THE BOTTOM LINE
Smart Bricks is a small funding round attached to a big idea: that real estate should be run with the same continuous, software-driven intelligence as public markets. If the team can back the narrative with real execution — robust data, transparent models, and credible early wins — it could redefine how cross-border property capital is deployed, especially from Europe. If not, it risks joining the long list of proptechs that promised to kill the spreadsheet and merely coloured in the cells.
The question for readers is simple: when AI agents start underwriting and negotiating property on your behalf, will you be ready to let them — or racing to understand how they think first?
