Smart Bricks selected for the inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First

Smart Bricks was selected for the inaugural class of Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First MENA and Turkey. Google announced the class as "top 15 AI focused startups, selected from hundreds of applications", and Smart Bricks was number 12 on its list.

Smart Bricks' class was the first edition of AI First in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey; when Google announced the next edition, it called it the second. Google described the programme as a 10-week, equity-free, hybrid accelerator for Seed to Series A startups, run in partnership with Google Cloud, that helps "high-potential startups based in MENA and Turkey grow with the best of Google through a mix of in-person and virtual activities, 1:1 mentoring, and group learning sessions."

Google launched the programme at an event at the Dubai Future Foundation Auditorium, and the ten weeks opened with a two-day event of panel discussions, workshops, mentorship sessions and networking. The programme was built around technical support and mentoring from engineers and business experts at Google and across the wider ecosystem, specialised Startup Success Managers from Google, and deep dives and workshops on product design, business growth and leadership. Google stated that the programme was completely free and that it takes no equity.

Google's own summary of the aim was simple: "to connect the best of Google's products and people to empower startups to scale their business, towards success in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI and technology."

When Google introduced the class, it described Smart Bricks in one line: a company that "develops an AI co-pilot to empower smarter real estate purchases." That was the starting point. Since then, Smart Bricks has gone deeper into the problem behind it: in the words of its funding announcement, autonomous reasoning systems "that allow capital to identify, evaluate, and execute real-estate investments end-to-end".

For that kind of work, the infrastructure matters as much as the models. Mohamed Mohamed, founder and CEO of Smart Bricks, described what Google's stack made possible in a Google Cloud post featuring the company: "Access to Google's AI and cloud stack has been instrumental in building and scaling our agentic AI models, particularly given the scale and complexity of the data we're working with."

The scale is real. Smart Bricks ingests over one million proprietary and public data feeds and applies agentic AI to analyse supply, pricing, liquidity, regulation and risk across global markets.

"The Google for Startups Accelerator played a key role in accelerating our technical development," Mohamed said. "And infrastructure like Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and BigQuery allowed us to significantly speed up our development cycles, improve model performance, and bring a much more robust, data-driven platform to market faster."

Google's own account of the result, in the same post, is that Smart Bricks "uses Google's machine learning pipelines to automate 99% of manual real estate investment workflows across Dubai, London, and New York."

For the investment firms, lenders, developers and advisors who use Smart Bricks, that is what the programme left behind in practice: faster development cycles behind the product, better model performance, and a more robust, data-driven platform.

Smart Bricks is an applied AI lab building the intelligence layer for global real estate. The step from an AI co-pilot for purchases to that intelligence layer follows the argument of The AI-Native Investment Firm, the first paper in the Smart Bricks Research Series.

The paper describes a third operating shift in institutional real estate, after spreadsheets and systems of record, and explains why most AI pilots fail to reach production: "Even the most capable model will fail in production if its figures are not traceable, its calculations are not repeatable and its work is not independently reviewed." A production-grade system, it argues, separates document reading from calculation, keeps construction and review independent, preserves the integrity of the model, and keeps judgement with people.

Those requirements are the shape of the platform. A private Company Brain holds what a firm knows, and each figure in a memo links back to the cell, page or email it came from. Real Estate and Market Intelligence bring in the asset and the market. Specialist agents combine all three into institutional-grade decisions. Frontier models handle language, and real estate judgement goes to Smart Bricks' own models, fine-tuned for real estate. Mohamed credits Google's AI and cloud stack with helping to build and scale the agentic AI models behind it.

Google's programme was designed to continue after the ten weeks: startups "continue to receive support via the Google for Startups Accelerator Alumni program and network." Smart Bricks has since named Google AI First among the programmes it is an alumnus of, alongside Microsoft GrowthX and NVIDIA Inception, and Google featured the company again when it introduced a later cohort of the accelerator.

The direction is set. The company that Google described as an AI co-pilot for smarter real estate purchases is now building the intelligence layer for the whole industry, on the Google infrastructure Mohamed credits for speeding up its development.

Sources: Google's announcement of the inaugural class (opens in a new tab) and Google Cloud's post featuring Smart Bricks (opens in a new tab).