The venture capital firm Sequoia Capital has invested $3 million in seed funding into Skyline AI, an Israeli company that uses artificial intelligence to help real estate professionals identify the right time to buy or sell properties, as TechCrunch first reported.
Skyline AI, which was founded in 2017, works by mining data from various records and using AI and machine learning technology to evaluate different situations in the real estate market. Some of its primary uses include foretelling future property values as well as making decisions about when to sell, renovate, or raise the cost of rent.
“AI works similarly to how the brain works in trying to create a machine gut feeling,” Guy Zipori, Skyline AI’s co-founder and CEO, told Inman. “[…] Eventually, it can create a better picture of the real estate assets and what can happen to those assets.”
Here’s how it works: the platform functions as a real estate map and dataset. It draws information about properties from 130 sources and evaluates over 10,000 attributes — including everything from building prices to nearby school zones — going back 50 years. The different factors are then stockpiled and cross-referenced to make predictions about individual buildings.
“The real estate industry was slow to embrace new technologies,” said Zipori, who founded Skyline AI with partners Or Hiltch, Iri Amirav and Amir Leitersdorf. “This is a really interesting time to change that.”
The properties in the map will be based out of the US. As of right now, Skyline AI’s services are best fitted for large hedge funds and institutional investors — companies that make big decisions about several properties at once.
“The promise of AI to transform commercial real estate investments cannot be understated,” said Haim Sadger, a Sequoia partner, in a statement to TechCrunch. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen AI disrupt a number of traditional industries and the real estate market should be no different. The power of Skyline AI technology to understand vast amounts of data that affect real estate transactions, will unlock billions of dollars in untapped value.”
The raised funds will, according to Zipori, go toward expanding Skyline AI’s machine learning technology team and growing the services that it offers to make even more types of predictions.
