Announcing Our Investment in Built AI

Rebuilding Fundamental Tooling for the World's Largest Asset Class

We are thrilled to announce our latest investment as we lead Built AI’s $6M Seed round, with participation from Lerer Hippeau and Timber Grove Ventures.

Commercial real estate moves hundreds of millions of dollars per day. And yet, one of the world’s largest and most consequential asset classes still runs on brittle spreadsheets, outdated modeling tools, and PDFs buried in inboxes.

That’s where Built AI enters. Their thesis is clear: real estate, one of the largest and most critical asset classes in the world, deserves modern tooling. Not just spreadsheets dressed up in a UI, but a purpose-built, AI-powered engine that lets investment teams underwrite smarter, faster, and more consistently.

In a world where “missed deals” is often just a function of bandwidth or speed, Built AI wants to make opportunity cost explicit, and reclaim time for what really matters: strategic deal analysis and key drivers that occur outside of spreadsheets.

Why Now?

Legacy players - Argus, Yardi, and a constellation of point solutions - weren’t built for the complexity, speed, or data fragmentation of today’s market.

Prior attempts to displace Argus failed because they ran into the same wall: data extraction wasn’t accurate enough. GenAI changed that. High-quality extraction from PDFs, spreadsheets, rent rolls, and deal docs is now finally fast, reliable, automatable, and commercially viable. This unlocks a completely new workflow: instant financial models generated directly from raw deal materials.

Combine that with leaner teams, rising transaction complexity, and industry-wide pressure for auditability, and the timing is perfect for an AI-native operating system for real-estate investing - exactly what Built AI is building.

The Product

Built AI is an AI-powered financial modeling and decision-support platform that analyzes investment opportunities in minutes instead of weeks - with transparent assumptions, line-by-line auditability, and a user-friendly interface that’s quick to learn.

Their wedge is simple but powerful: Turn fragmented, unstructured documents and deal materials into instant, accurate underwriting - and then unify everything a firm knows about a property, portfolio, or market into one end-to-end platform.

• Automated screening & underwriting at speed. Built AI can generate a full cash-flow model - including complex leasing scenarios and hold-period assumptions - in minutes, based on the user’s inputs and documents uploaded. That means fewer late nights in Argus and Excel, and fewer oversights from manual entry.
• Instant portfolio aggregation and analysis: C-suite need to make decisions at the portfolio level and Built AI automatically rolls up existing portfolios and any potential acquisitions. That means instant deep-dive analysis and faster decisions.
• Collaboration & shareability. Built for teamwork: analyses can be shared with partners, sponsors, or brokers in a few clicks - removing email chains, lost attachments, and miscommunication.

One major broker recently cut a two-week underwriting exercise that previously required multiple analysts down to a few minutes using Built AI.

In short: Built AI doesn’t just optimize underwriting - it raises the floor of intelligence across a firm’s entire investment stack.

The Team

Built AI is built by real estate people for real estate people.

It was co-founded by investment banking and real estate private equity veteran Natan Lempert, who previously held roles at Goldman Sachs, Citi and Benson Elliott, and Firoz Noordeen, who previously launched and scaled fintech ventures as Director at Natwest Ventures.

In our view, 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.

Traction

The quality of the team and product paired with the market demand has led to strong early traction and proof points.

Built AI’s customers include US publicly traded developer Howard Hughes and global real estate firm CBRE, FTSE 100-listed REIT LondonMetric, and Knight Frank Investment Management, among many others.

Howard Hughes’ CFO remarked that “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.”

We’re proud to back Built AI as they turn real-estate investing into something modern, agile, and scalable. If you’re a real estate investment professional looking to improve your deal analyses, book a demo with Built AI today ⚡️

PS - This investment has to be my wildest sourcing story ever. It involved a mohel, a Miami connection, and a consulting skill that got me through the 2008 financial crisis. Watch this ~2 minute clip to hear the whole story.

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Congratulations to the entire Built AI team! You can check out their press coverage in the Commercial Observer.