Smart Bricks has closed a $5 million pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Speedrun fund, bringing Silicon Valley capital into a Dubai-based push to rebuild how property deals are sourced and executed.

The 18-month-old company is developing an AI-native software layer for real-estate investing. Instead of brokers, spreadsheets and weeks of back-and-forth diligence, it runs autonomous systems that scan markets, score assets and handle much of the paperwork. Smart Bricks says that its platform can shrink a process that often takes months down to mere minutes.

Real estate remains one of the few trillion-dollar asset classes without a modern data stack. Information is scattered across local registries, listings and private networks. Smaller investors still piece together decisions from partial data while large funds rely on proprietary tools.

“Global real estate is one of the largest asset classes in the world, yet most individual and cross-border investors are still operating with PDFs, WhatsApp threads, incomplete data, and opaque fees,” said founder and CEO Mohamed Mohamed. “Institutions have proprietary data, AI underwriting, and integrated execution. Everyone else is effectively flying blind. Smart Bricks closes that gap”.

The platform pulls from more than one million public and proprietary feeds and continuously models supply, pricing, liquidity, regulation and risk. It then surfaces what it ranks as the top 0.1% of opportunities and automates valuation, underwriting, due diligence, negotiation and financing workflows.

Smart Bricks is not positioning itself as a marketplace. It pitches itself as plumbing — infrastructure for capital deploying across cities including Dubai, London, New York and Miami.

“Capital and talent have already gone global; the tooling for real-estate investing has not,” Mohamed said. “Smart Bricks is building the intelligence layer that finally allows real estate to operate at the speed, transparency, and scale modern markets demand”.

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Backers alongside a16z include Techstars, 500 Global, Cornerstone VC, South Loop Ventures, Harvard Business School Alumni Angels and Cento Ventures, plus angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Airbnb and Blackstone.

For Dubai, the deal adds another AI and proptech startup to a growing roster as the emirate tries to anchor global capital and digitize core sectors. Property is central to that story. If software can make cross-border deals faster and less opaque, the region stands to capture more of that flow.