In digital asset investment, low entry barriers and fractional investing are becoming a trend, while topics such as real-world asset (RWA) tokenization and on-chain assets continue to gain momentum. A similar logic is emerging in property technology (PropTech): a digital real estate investment platform headquartered in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) is working to package established properties into digital products that can be bought with a low minimum. The platform's co-founder and co-CEO shared the platform model, growth path, and technology outlook in a recent industry conversation.
Platform Model: Invest in Established Real Estate Across Borders Through One App
The platform positions itself as a digital real estate investment platform that allows anyone globally to invest in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and recently launched U.S. real estate within minutes, starting from a minimum of AED 500, all through one app. In other words, users do not need to open accounts in multiple locations or have traditionally large amounts of capital to participate in cross-border property investment.
From Market Inefficiency to Packaging Completed Homes
The team's initial judgment stemmed from clear inefficiencies in the market. The platform's co-founder said that before the pandemic, the Dubai real estate market was roughly USD 40–50 billion, and after the pandemic it at one point approached USD 200 billion; yet this enormous market has long lacked investment products that could deliver on return promises. For a long time, investors buying property in Dubai have often been at a disadvantage because the local real estate market has historically been dominated by retail buyers rather than institutional investors.
Based on this observation, the platform did not choose off-plan properties, but instead targeted completed existing housing stock in Dubai that could immediately generate rental income, repackaging it into consumer-grade products that could be offered at scale through digital channels with a low entry threshold. Another reason that makes off-plan products attractive is not only developers' marketing investment, but also its low entry barrier—if the down payment is 10% and there is no mortgage, even though completed homes are more expensive, the appeal of buying completed homes and earning higher returns remains clear. These factors together illustrate that the market should have a better way to invest in real estate: one that does not require excessive capital commitments, offers transparent services from a regulated professional company, and allows entry at a very low threshold.
Based on the above, the team set the company's vision as "a world where real estate is fully open, accessible, borderless, transparent, and liquid," and its mission as enabling everyone to own and accumulate quality real estate.
Over AED 1.5 Billion in Cumulative Sales with No Fundamental Pivot
To date, the platform has sold over AED 1.5 billion in total real estate transactions through its own channels. For a startup, pivots are often unavoidable, but this platform has not undergone a fundamental pivot. The co-founder acknowledged that the platform has benefited from a bull market environment, but this also brings its own problems. The platform is more like a real estate e-commerce marketplace—the team often compares it to shopping on Amazon, with the goal of making investing just as simple—and it is a two-sided marketplace.
As it evolved, the platform advanced mainly around its "borderless" mission. The team entered Saudi Arabia early, applying to the Saudi Capital Market Authority (CMA) for a license to carry out the business closest to fractional property investment in the country. By comparison, the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) have already made significant progress in this area, allowing the market to flourish and attracting foreign capital. From a foreign direct investment (FDI) perspective, DIFC and DFSA have had a strong impact: more than half of the platform's transaction volume comes from outside the UAE, investors come from more than 170 countries, and the platform has 2 million users. The team hopes to replicate the same model in Saudi Arabia, making the platform a multi-market platform and ultimately a global company that emerged from an international financial centre.
What needs to be considered now is how to operate under different market conditions and how to accelerate international growth. The platform completed its Series B financing before the conflict began, raising USD 31 million. The round included strategic and financial investors such as Emirates NBD, Mubadala, and Propertyfinder, with historical investors also including MEVP, Saudi Aramco's venture capital arm Wa'ed, STV, and institutional investor Jada. The platform has a strong mix of venture capital and strategic investors and is building deep integration partnerships with Propertyfinder and Emirates NBD to support the next phase of growth.
Why DIFC and DFSA Were Chosen as the Starting Point
The core reasons for choosing DIFC and DFSA were regulatory credibility and the compliance culture necessary to be responsible for investor funds. The platform did not take the route of crypto-tokenized real estate without regulatory oversight—projects of that kind have mostly failed to truly take off. That is also why the platform is now one of the largest fractional property investment platforms globally, and comparable U.S. platforms are relatively smaller. Beyond DIFC and DFSA, the appeal of Dubai itself is equally important.
The platform opened its first office at DIFC Gate Avenue and has since expanded to become the largest tenant in Gate Avenue. The area offers mature amenities and lifestyle conveniences, with dining, retail, and services spanning high-end, mid-range, and mass-market segments. Because the business is relatively complex and requires structures such as special purpose vehicles (SPVs), the platform has achieved deep integration with DIFC systems: SPVs can now be created in minutes, and thousands of shareholders can be added to the share register, whereas in the early days this process often took three weeks or even months. Looking back, DIFC's support has been a key reason for the platform's success.
Next Steps: Diversifying Asset Classes and International Expansion
The future direction has two dimensions: local/regional and international. The platform is actively promoting diversification of fractionalizable asset classes in the region, especially in the UAE. Currently, the DFSA regime restricts it to the residential sector, but there are still viable paths to expand asset classes, and investor demand for more diverse assets is strong. In the UAE market, the focus is on adding more investable properties; in the Saudi market, the platform initially started as a fund distributor, but the real innovation will come from fractional property ownership, and the team hopes to advance this model in Saudi Arabia. Dubai and Saudi Arabia are the platform's two core markets, and the platform also hopes to introduce properties from other markets to provide users with geographic diversification.
In addition, the platform plans to leverage its strategic partnerships with Propertyfinder and Emirates NBD to further multiply business growth.
AI and Tokenization: On-Chain Real Estate Assets and Internal Efficiency
On technology and future form, the team believes that blockchain has matured and is beginning to be adopted by regulators. In the next two to five years, ownership interests in real estate assets are very likely to be represented on-chain in token form—this is a clear direction. Among physical assets, especially high-value assets, the trend of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization in real estate will continue; the key is only how quickly regulators allow adoption of this technology. The platform is already prepared for this and has received in-principle approval from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA).
AI is also seen as a game-changing technology and is highly complementary to blockchain. In terms of team productivity, agentic AI is significantly improving internal processes. The platform has launched multiple use cases, and product and technology teams regularly hold AI office hours to help all teams apply the technology to their own workflows. Repetitive foundational work becomes easier, allowing teams to devote more energy to strategic thinking, and output per unit of time has multiplied. On the front end, the platform has launched an AI question-and-answer layer that provides conversational FAQs for investors browsing properties. The platform has always emphasized providing investors with sufficient transparency and information before investment decisions, including return forecasts, third-party valuations, and 3D tools; now users can ask the platform's AI directly instead of manually searching within the app.
For digital asset investors, this path of fractionalizing physical assets, making them cross-border, and exploring tokenization within a compliant framework echoes the trend of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. Low entry barriers, transparency, compliance, and on-chain ownership may become a common direction for more asset classes entering digital portfolios.
