BuiltAI Secures $6M Seed Round

London-based BuiltAI, a financial modelling platform for commercial real estate investment, announced Tuesday that it has secured $6 million in seed funding to support its growth and help establish its footprint in the U.S. commercial real estate market.

Manhattan-based venture capital firm Work-Bench led the round, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, proptech VC Timber Grove Ventures, Emerald Pine Capital, and several angel investors and property sector veterans.

Founded in 2021, BuiltAI has scaled rapidly in the U.K. and Europe, where investors have used the platform to analyse $70 billion of investment opportunities over the past year. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to extract and analyse building data.

The proptech company plans to use the seed funding to expand operations into the U.S., with an office in New York City, Miami or Texas, said Natan Lempert, CEO and co-founder at BuiltAI.

“We started the business with the first product line, which is an AI-powered financial modeling and underwriting tool to basically help people analyze deals quicker, more efficiently and accurately with our technology,” said Lempert, a former real estate investment banking and private equity veteran with Goldman Sachs, Citi and Benson Elliott. “Recently, we have launched a new product line, which is asset management portfolio management, which empowers investors to help them analyze on a portfolio basis all of their existing assets. It also allows them to optimize their portfolio through scenario analysis, identifying key risks and optimization opportunities, all on an AI powered platform.”

The raise comes at a time when BuiltAI has felt the pull from the U.S. real estate market for its new product, said Lempert.

“We’re working with Howard Hughes Holdings in the U.S., the large, publicly traded developer backed by Bill Ackman from Pershing Square Capital,” Lempert said. “They came to us eight months ago with a problem they were facing and they really liked what we were doing —- specifically our technology that had developed.

“So they told us that they wanted to basically do the same thing that we’re doing in Europe and we started working with them, co-building and developing — what we call the ‘U.S.-ifying’ of our platform.”

BuiltAI clients have included commercial portfolios, but it is also seeing a large pool of multifamily and other residential, especially in Florida, Texas and the Carolinas, said Lempert. “We’re also anticipating a trend: There’s a lot of companies that are relocating into Florida. The VC community is growing and the tech ecosystem is flourishing at those micro locations.”

Having come from the real estate private equity investment world, Lempert said he was astonished that one of the largest asset classes in the world still operates with legacy tools that are decades old in some cases, with people wasting so much time on menial tasks making questionable decisions in acquisitions or asset management as  result.

“It’s because they don’t have the right tools and they don’t have access to the right data,” he said. “So, being in that industry and on the ground, I thought there was a huge opportunity to transform a legacy industry that’s ripe for innovation.

“We’re starting to see players that I admire, Blackstone, for example, spending millions of dollars on their technological transformation and initiatives. They’ve hired teams of data scientists, computer scientists and data engineers to undertake this transformation. And what is happening is that all of the players are having an awakening, because otherwise they’re going to be falling behind.”

The lead investor in BuildAI’s seed round agrees with that vision of the near future.

“We couldn’t be more excited to invest in BuiltAI and support Natan and COO and co-founder Firoz Noordeen,” said Jonathan Lehr, co-founder and general partner of Work-Bench, in a statement. “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 their computer screen to transact with more speed and confidence than ever before.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.