Smart Bricks selected for the Palantir Startup Fellowship

Smart Bricks has been selected for the Palantir Startup Fellowship, Palantir's programme for early-stage companies building AI products. Mohamed Mohamed, founder and CEO of Smart Bricks, announced it in one line: "Smart Bricks has been selected for and is now backed through the Palantir Startup Fellowship."

Palantir launched the Startup Fellowship as a programme "designed to accelerate a select group of startups alongside our world-class engineers." When it opened applications for a new cohort, it set out the terms in five lines: pre-seed to Series B startups, equity-free, building with AIP and Foundry.

Those are Palantir's two platforms. Palantir describes AIP as a way to "run LLMs and other models on your private network with full control", and Foundry as "the Ontology/AI-powered operating system for the modern enterprise." On its page for startups, it sums up the purpose of the programme as "enabling startups to build and deploy world class AI", and its fellowship application page offers startups the chance to "work with dedicated Palantir FDEs on solution design."

The fellowship takes no equity. Being backed through it means access to Palantir's people, technology and experience. It is not an investment.

Mohamed puts the reason plainly: "Palantir has built one of the most important AI and software platforms in the world, particularly around deploying AI into complex, mission-critical environments."

That is the part of Palantir's work that matters most here. Institutional real estate decisions end in front of an investment committee, and Smart Bricks' own research frames the test for any AI system as one question asked of the next deal that reaches the committee: can every material number in the memo be traced to an independent source? Getting AI to work inside that kind of environment is a harder problem than getting it to produce an answer, and it is exactly the kind of environment Mohamed singles out in Palantir's work.

The two companies also start from the same view of where the value in AI sits. In Mohamed's words: "Palantir's thesis around AI is very aligned with ours: the biggest opportunity is not simply adding an LLM interface on top of existing software. It is rebuilding how organizations operate around AI-native systems, proprietary data, specialized agents and deeply integrated workflows."

"As part of the fellowship, we'll work closely with Palantir's global team and leadership, gaining access to their technology, infrastructure and learnings from building and deploying AI at enormous scale," Mohamed said.

He names four things that work is for: to refine Smart Bricks, to strengthen its technical architecture, to accelerate its institutional platform, and to bring into real estate the lessons Palantir has learned deploying AI across some of the world's largest and most sophisticated organisations.

For the investment firms, lenders, developers and advisors Smart Bricks works with, the institutional platform is the part that matters. It combines a private Company Brain with Real Estate and Market Intelligence, and specialist agents that combine all three into institutional-grade decisions. Mohamed's aims for the fellowship point straight at it: a stronger technical architecture, and an institutional platform that moves faster.

Smart Bricks is an applied AI lab building the intelligence layer for global real estate. Mohamed describes the ambition this way: "Our ambition has evolved far beyond building another real estate software company. We are building the leading applied AI lab for real estate globally, developing the models, agents, data infrastructure and intelligence systems that will ultimately sit underneath how investors, developers, lenders, brokers and operators make decisions."

The same argument runs through The AI-Native Investment Firm, the first paper in the Smart Bricks Research Series. It describes a third operating shift in institutional real estate, after spreadsheets and systems of record, and explains why most AI pilots stall: "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." Its conclusion is that the system which builds an analysis should not be the system that approves it, and that people keep the judgement.

Smart Bricks is built around those controls. The Company Brain holds what a firm knows, a memory of every deal run records what was asked, what was assumed and what the committee decided, and each figure in a memo links back to the cell, page or email it came from. Specialist agents do the analysis. Frontier models handle language, while real estate judgement goes to Smart Bricks' own models, fine-tuned for real estate.

Palantir's view, as Mohamed reads it, and the paper's argument point the same way. The value is not in adding a chat window to existing software. It is in rebuilding how a firm works around AI-native systems, proprietary data and specialist agents that it can trust with a decision.

"Over the coming months, we'll work hand-in-hand with Palantir to refine Smart Bricks, strengthen our technical architecture, accelerate our institutional platform and take the lessons they have learned deploying AI across some of the world's largest and most sophisticated organizations into real estate," Mohamed said.

He sees the fellowship as part of a longer arc: "For me, this is another major validation of the direction we're taking with Smart Bricks 2.0. We started by helping people make better real estate investment decisions. We're now building toward something much bigger: the AI infrastructure and intelligence layer for the global real estate industry."

More on the programme: Palantir for Startups (opens in a new tab).