Dubai-Based Smart Bricks Raises US$5 Million Pre-Seed Round Led By Silicon Valley's Andreessen Horowitz

Dubai-based frontier artificial intelligence (AI) lab Smart Bricks has raised US$5 million in a pre-seed round led by Silicon Valley-based venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z), with participation from funds and angel investors across the US, Europe, and the Middle East.

Founded by Mohamed Mohamed in the UAE in 2024, Smart Bricks is building an end-to-end platform for real estate investing serving both individual and institutional capital. The platform applies agentic AI across the full investment lifecycle, ingesting more than one million proprietary and public data feeds to analyze supply, pricing, liquidity, regulation, and risk in real time, ranking opportunities by expected risk-adjusted return, and automating workflows spanning valuation, underwriting, due diligence, negotiation, financing, and post-transaction support.

In an interview with Inc. Arabia, Mohamed told us that the idea for Smart Bricks emerged from his years of working with institutional real estate investors, where he saw that advanced tools used to manage billion-dollar portfolios were embedded in fund-specific legacy systems and unavailable to individual investors, who continued to rely on spreadsheets, static listings, and subjective judgment. As such, he built Smart Bricks to provide both retail and institutional investors with the opportunities, intelligence, and execution workflows typically provided by leading private equity or institutional real estate funds. 

“Our vision is to redefine and set the global standard for real estate investing where anyone can invest with the same confidence as the largest institutions," Mohamed told Inc. Arabia. "Our mission is to make real estate investing simple, smart, and more profitable. While most individual investors rely on a limited set of data points, the Smart Bricks system evaluates live inventory across target markets by synthesizing over 1,000 data points, including macroeconomic dynamics, supply formation, infrastructure investment, demographic shifts, and market sentiment. This broader analytical frame allows assets to be assessed in context, rather than through the limited set of indicators typically available to individual investors.” 

According to Mohamed, the experience for individual investors has often been one of “flying blind,” shaped less by a lack of information than by the absence of a coherent decision-making framework. “Institutional tools were never perfect, but they offered something retail investors fundamentally lacked: structure," he explained. "Even when the data was incomplete or imperfect, institutions could underwrite investments within a disciplined framework—pricing assumptions, risk bands, portfolio exposure, and exit logic were explicit. Retail investors, by contrast, were often making high-stakes decisions with fragmented information, static listings, and intuition... The gap wasn’t just access to data; it was access to a system for thinking about data." 

Smart Bricks has thus been designed to address that white space without removing investor agency. “Smart Bricks doesn’t try to replace investor judgment or hide it behind automation," Mohamed said. "We give users direct ownership and full decision-making authority—but we supercharge that experience with AI. The platform surfaces high-yield opportunities, flags undervalued assets, alerts investors when market conditions suggest it may be time to exit, and continuously recalibrates insights based on individual goals and risk preferences. The investor remains in control; the intelligence works alongside them." 

“That distinction is critical to avoiding another black box,” Mohamed continued. “Take the Smart Bricks Score as an example. It provides a 360-degree view of an asset, but just as importantly, it shows the inputs behind the number—pricing dynamics, yield potential, liquidity signals, and market momentum, along with the weight each factor carries. Users don’t just see a score; they see why it exists, and how changes in assumptions would alter it. We’re thus translating structured investing into a transparent, interactive experience. The goal isn’t to tell investors what to do—it’s to give them the same analytical footing institutions have had, so their decisions are informed, deliberate, and adaptable.”

The new investment is thus set to support Smart Bricks’ efforts to build an AI-native infrastructure layer designed to standardize how real estate investments are analyzed, executed, and managed globally. For Mohamed, the company’s investor base is playing a crucial role in shaping its trajectory. “Andreessen Horowitz’s involvement, alongside other global funds and operators, has played a meaningful role in shaping Smart Bricks’ trajectory beyond capital—particularly when it comes to geographic expansion and long-term product ambition,” he said. “As we prepare to enter new markets, their experience and network have helped us lay the foundations for expansion in a thoughtful way, from navigating localization challenges, to supporting us in identifying the right local partners and operators, to ensure we can adapt the product effectively for new audiences. From a product perspective, the mentorship and support has also influenced how we think about the role of agentic AI in our platform—specifically, how autonomous systems can support increasingly complex decision-making across diverse real estate markets.”

Mohamed also highlighted that having investors who have seen category-defining AI platforms scale globally have pushed him and his team at Smart Bricks to design with that level of complexity and ambition in mind from an early stage. “The reach of a16z from a talent perspective has been equally impactful,” he added. “Their network of founders, engineers, and experienced builders is immense, and they’ve facilitated access to people who have built and scaled products at global scale before. That exposure has helped us benchmark ourselves against the very best and accelerate learning in areas that would otherwise take years to develop organically.”

In terms of the road ahead, Mohamed declared that Smart Bricks’ growth trajectory will be governed by its clientele. “Our expansion is not abstract or top-down, it’s driven by our users,” he said. “Many of our customers are already investing, or actively looking to invest, across established global corridors such as Dubai-London and Dubai-New York. By following that demand, we’re enabling capital to move more intelligently through corridors that already exist, but are operationally fragmented. That dynamic strengthens regulation as a competitive moat. Each new jurisdiction we support deepens the platform’s regulatory intelligence and compounds its defensibility. Real estate regulation is complex, fragmented, and often localized. Most platforms either oversimplify it or avoid it entirely. By embedding regulatory awareness directly into the investment process, and scaling it in response to real investor behavior, we reduce risk for users, and make it increasingly difficult for others to replicate what we’re building globally.”