The UAE’s Next Export: A Blueprint for Property Investment Technology
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Dubai’s skyline tells one story, but the deals being signed in its tech hubs tell another that merits closer attention. While the world fixates on cranes and glass towers, the UAE has been building infrastructure for artificial intelligence with sustained institutional commitment.
When Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the largest venture capital fund in the world, led a funding round for Smart Bricks, the Dubai-based proptech platform I founded, it signalled something beyond typical emerging market speculation and demanded that we ask what a16z saw that others might have been missing.
Over the past decade, the UAE has invested heavily in building an AI ecosystem designed for long-term economic impact. With a national target for AI to contribute 14% of GDP by 2031, the focus has been on capital deployment, infrastructure and execution at scale. Early initiatives across financial services point less to experimentation than to a sustained strategy to embed AI as a core driver of growth.
I founded Smart Bricks after years working for institutional real estate investors, where I saw a structural limitation in how assets were identified, evaluated and managed. The tools that shaped billion-dollar portfolios were deeply embedded in fund-specific workflows and legacy systems, leaving them inaccessible to retail investors. The issue was not access to institutional insight, but the absence of systems designed to support sophisticated decision-making outside institutional settings.
Smart Bricks compresses what used to take six to twelve months and a dozen intermediaries into a single platform. While most individual investors rely on a limited set of data points, our system evaluates live inventory across target markets by synthesising 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 narrow set of indicators typically available to individual investors.
Once a property is identified, offers can be submitted directly through the platform, contracts reviewed by in-house counsel and transactions closed without the friction of coordinating external brokers, lawyers or fragmented workflows. Post-acquisition, the asset is tracked in a live portfolio dashboard that monitors performance with daily valuation updates, rent-roll analytics, market comparable movement and liquidity heat maps.
Our AI advisor handles standard diligence and provides actionable guidance on allocation, timing and optimisation, enabling users to grow and compound their real estate portfolios with institutional-level discipline. The result is institutional-grade infrastructure delivered at retail scale. Every step from search to sale happens in one workflow, with the data architecture and execution capacity that hedge funds and family offices have relied on for years, rebuilt for individual investors who want the same edge without the same cost structure.
The UAE offers an unusually effective testbed for this model because its property market combines liquidity with minimal legacy constraints. Dubai’s real estate sector recorded AED686.8 billion in transaction volume across 215,700 sales in 2025, yet it lacks the entrenched intermediaries that define older markets, where decades-old brokerage structures and incompatible municipal databases create friction that platforms must navigate around rather than integrate with.
The government’s digitization of title registries and streamlined foreign ownership rules mean proptech platforms can connect directly to the transactional layer, and my decision to launch Smart Bricks in Dubai reflects recognition that the city’s legislative posture toward transparency creates operational clarity that allows for rapid implementation.
The infrastructure we have built in Dubai — including data pipelines, AI models trained on localised market behavior and transaction protocols — was designed with portability in mind, using architecture that separates market-specific variables from core logic. This means expansion into New York, London or other tier-one markets does not require foundational rebuilding, with the UAE serving as the proving ground where aligned capital, regulation and technology have demonstrated that broader access to institutional-grade analysis can materially change how investors evaluate and deploy capital.
Early platform data indicates that broader access to institutional-grade analysis is translating into measurably different outcomes. Smart Bricks users exhibit longer holding periods and more diversified portfolio construction, patterns historically associated with stronger risk-adjusted performance in institutional real estate portfolios. Our roadmap includes launches in the US and UK markets, where the same analytical framework will adapt to different zoning regimes, tax structures and liquidity dynamics while preserving the core thesis that access to better data produces better outcomes.
As global real estate markets move toward greater transparency and data-driven decision-making, Smart Bricks is positioned to help investors navigate that shift. With a growing user base, strong institutional backing and a platform built for scale, we are extending institutional-grade analysis to a broader class of investors and influencing how real estate capital is deployed.
Dubai’s skyline tells one story, but the deals being signed in its tech hubs tell another that merits closer attention. While the world fixates on cranes and glass towers, the UAE has been building infrastructure for artificial intelligence with sustained institutional commitment.
When Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the largest venture capital fund in the world, led a funding round for Smart Bricks, the Dubai-based proptech platform I founded, it signalled something beyond typical emerging market speculation and demanded that we ask what a16z saw that others might have been missing.
Over the past decade, the UAE has invested heavily in building an AI ecosystem designed for long-term economic impact. With a national target for AI to contribute 14% of GDP by 2031, the focus has been on capital deployment, infrastructure and execution at scale. Early initiatives across financial services point less to experimentation than to a sustained strategy to embed AI as a core driver of growth.
I founded Smart Bricks after years working for institutional real estate investors, where I saw a structural limitation in how assets were identified, evaluated and managed. The tools that shaped billion-dollar portfolios were deeply embedded in fund-specific workflows and legacy systems, leaving them inaccessible to retail investors. The issue was not access to institutional insight, but the absence of systems designed to support sophisticated decision-making outside institutional settings.
Smart Bricks compresses what used to take six to twelve months and a dozen intermediaries into a single platform. While most individual investors rely on a limited set of data points, our system evaluates live inventory across target markets by synthesising 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 narrow set of indicators typically available to individual investors.
Once a property is identified, offers can be submitted directly through the platform, contracts reviewed by in-house counsel and transactions closed without the friction of coordinating external brokers, lawyers or fragmented workflows. Post-acquisition, the asset is tracked in a live portfolio dashboard that monitors performance with daily valuation updates, rent-roll analytics, market comparable movement and liquidity heat maps.
Our AI advisor handles standard diligence and provides actionable guidance on allocation, timing and optimisation, enabling users to grow and compound their real estate portfolios with institutional-level discipline. The result is institutional-grade infrastructure delivered at retail scale. Every step from search to sale happens in one workflow, with the data architecture and execution capacity that hedge funds and family offices have relied on for years, rebuilt for individual investors who want the same edge without the same cost structure.
The UAE offers an unusually effective testbed for this model because its property market combines liquidity with minimal legacy constraints. Dubai’s real estate sector recorded AED686.8 billion in transaction volume across 215,700 sales in 2025, yet it lacks the entrenched intermediaries that define older markets, where decades-old brokerage structures and incompatible municipal databases create friction that platforms must navigate around rather than integrate with.
The government’s digitization of title registries and streamlined foreign ownership rules mean proptech platforms can connect directly to the transactional layer, and my decision to launch Smart Bricks in Dubai reflects recognition that the city’s legislative posture toward transparency creates operational clarity that allows for rapid implementation.
The infrastructure we have built in Dubai — including data pipelines, AI models trained on localised market behavior and transaction protocols — was designed with portability in mind, using architecture that separates market-specific variables from core logic. This means expansion into New York, London or other tier-one markets does not require foundational rebuilding, with the UAE serving as the proving ground where aligned capital, regulation and technology have demonstrated that broader access to institutional-grade analysis can materially change how investors evaluate and deploy capital.
Early platform data indicates that broader access to institutional-grade analysis is translating into measurably different outcomes. Smart Bricks users exhibit longer holding periods and more diversified portfolio construction, patterns historically associated with stronger risk-adjusted performance in institutional real estate portfolios. Our roadmap includes launches in the US and UK markets, where the same analytical framework will adapt to different zoning regimes, tax structures and liquidity dynamics while preserving the core thesis that access to better data produces better outcomes.
As global real estate markets move toward greater transparency and data-driven decision-making, Smart Bricks is positioned to help investors navigate that shift. With a growing user base, strong institutional backing and a platform built for scale, we are extending institutional-grade analysis to a broader class of investors and influencing how real estate capital is deployed.
