BuiltAI raises $6 million to scale platform for global real estate investors

BuiltAI, the financial modelling platform for commercial real estate investment, has secured $6 million in seed funding to support its growth and help establish its footprint in the $22 trillion US commercial real estate market. The company has scaled rapidly in the UK and Europe, where investors have used the platform to analyse $70 billion of investment opportunities over the past year.

The round was led by New York City-based VC Work-Bench, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Timber Grove Ventures, Emerald Pine as well as several angel investors and property sector veterans. This includes current Manet Capital Managing Partner Jeremy Ford, who previously held senior real estate investment roles at The Carlyle Group and REEF.

Built AI was co-founded in 2020 by real estate investment banking and private equity veteran Natan Lempert, who previously held roles at Goldman Sachs, Citi and Benson Elliott, and Firoz Noordeen, previously launched and scaled fintech ventures as Director at Natwest Ventures. Built AI was inspired by the transformative potential of technology and AI in real estate investment, having realised its ability to replace several archaic underwriting processes.

The platform uses machine learning to instantly extract and analyse building data to help clients manage their existing portfolio and underwrite new investment opportunities. Within minutes, the platform produces detailed financial models to create full business plans and scenarios for any asset, a 10x improvement on current processes The platform takes into account real estate fundamentals, lease terms, valuation, tenant profile and local market data. This can be done for single assets as well as entire portfolios, allowing investors to determine the optimal business plan and asset management strategies. The platform’s new asset management tool, rolled out on the back of this funding round, provides real estate owners with full lifecycle modeling, instant portfolio roll-up and real-time scenario analysis for faster decision making.

Jonathan Lehr, Co-Founder and General Partner of Work-Bench, said: “We couldn’t be more excited to invest in BuiltAI and support Natan and Firoz. The future of software requires three essential attributes: domain expertise, AI skills, and ingenuity. These founders have all three and seek to fundamentally reimagine the real estate investment process. By automating away manual tasks, unlocking organizations’ historical data, and overlaying market data, real estate investment professionals can rapidly screen deals, run various scenarios, and spend time laser focused on key diligence areas outside of their computer screen to transact with more speed and confidence than ever before.”

Andrea Hippeau, Partner at Lerer Hippeau, said: “Recent advancements in generative AI have the potential to address so much inefficiency and frustration in the real estate industry – if deployed appropriately and strategically. Natan and Firoz’s solution will transform every stage of the property asset lifecycle, and we couldn’t be happier to be partnering with them.”

Despite $26 billion spent every year on real estate software solutions, screening investment opportunities and modelling is still dominated by manual tasks; most often on spreadsheets. Not only do tasks such as manual data entry and extraction prove incredibly time consuming, but 88% of these financial models have been found to contain material errors. It takes at least two weeks on average to analyse deal opportunities, with datasets sat on different systems, which means that companies miss out on other potential deals in their pipeline.  

BuiltAI’s global client list includes US publicly traded developer Howard Hughes and global real estate consultancy CBRE, FTSE 100-listed REIT LondonMetric, Knight Frank Investment Management, who manage $5.2 billion of real estate assets for global institutions and high-net-worth individuals, as well as London developers Dorrington and PPR Estates.

Andrew Smith, Strategy Director at LondonMetric, said: “We were introduced to Built AI in 2023.  We recognised the value of the platform and worked closely with the team to develop the product.  We have enjoyed working with the team who we found to be knowledgeable, commercial and highly approachable.  The product is well established in our business enhancing our portfolio management decisions and we continue to work with the Built AI team to find mutually beneficial solutions to enhance the product further.”

Carlos Olea, CFO at Howard Hughes, said: “Built AI is helping us reimagine asset management by automating the analysis of rent rolls, cashflows, and business plans—which will allow us to do in minutes what it currently takes days. The ability to run multiple scenarios at both the property and portfolio level in real time is invaluable. We’re excited to be a design partner as they continue to expand and enhance their platform.”

The company is in advanced discussions with some of the largest US REITS, institutional investors and brokerage companies about using the platform, having already expanded to the US to service North American clients.

Natan Lempert, CEO and co-founder of BuiltAI, commented: “Generative AI is becoming increasingly embedded in financial decisions, to translate data at scale and automate underwriting. Real estate is the world’s largest asset class and yet the tools used to appraise deals have barely evolved in the last 40 years. Billions of dollars worth of investment deals are still screened every year using outdated, error-prone processes leading to over $185 billion in annual losses because of incorrect valuation metrics or missed opportunities. Our AI solution will be transformative for every stage of the property asset lifecycle, from sourcing, to acquisition to disposal, for brokers, investors, lenders and valuers.”

 Firoz Noordeen, COO and co-founder of BuiltAI, added: “Real estate investors still take hours, and often even days, to analyse deals, consuming a large amount of business resources. Our platform reduces that analysis time by 90%, allowing deals to be forensically analysed, with a customised business plan created within 45 minutes. On top of accuracy and supporting faster decision making, the platform enables investment professionals to analyse a much higher volume of prospective assets and focus their efforts on the best prospects, which directly translates to positive commercial performance.”

In addition to supporting BuiltAI’s efforts to scale its existing business in the US and UK, the capital will also help further develop its interactive AI Agent and platform capabilities to support increasingly complex investment models and different use cases. In time the company will be able to help customers to update business plans of existing assets, produce data to support debt refinancing and produce materials for sale processes.