Dubai-based proptech startup – Daleel – has raised $3m in pre-seed funding to build what it describes as an institutional-grade intelligence layer for regional real estate markets.
The round is understood to be the largest pre-seed raise to date for an AI-native real estate platform in the GCC, underscoring growing investor confidence in data-led property infrastructure emerging outside the US and Europe.
The company was founded by Ilan Cohen, a former Dubai-based property broker, and Ely Weichsel, an AI engineer with over a decade of experience building machine-learning systems for global enterprises.
Together, they set out to address a structural problem Cohen encountered firsthand: a lack of transparent, verifiable pricing data in one of the world’s most active property markets.
After closing more than AED 450m in transactions across off-plan and secondary markets, Ilan saw how fragmented data forced agents, buyers and investors to rely on intuition rather than evidence. Government transaction records, listing portals and mortgage data all existed – but connecting them into a coherent picture required hours of manual work.
Daleel’s approach is to unify those datasets at source. The platform combines official government transaction data – including historic sale prices, Ejari rental contracts, mortgage registrations and service charges — with live listings from every major portal. Properties are deduplicated so each asset appears once, regardless of how many platforms list it.
Rather than presenting this information as a traditional search database, Daleel has been built from the ground up for AI-driven interaction. Users query the system conversationally, asking questions about fair value, yield, downside risk or location-specific demand. The platform responds using verified transaction data, live market activity and contextual analysis – delivering in seconds what previously took hours.
The company operates within Dubai Land Department’s Real Estate Evolution Space (REES), a government-backed initiative designed to accelerate innovation, data access and digital transformation across the emirate’s property sector. This positioning gives Daleel direct alignment with Dubai’s broader push to modernise real estate infrastructure.
At launch, the platform goes live with Dubai as its first market, covering more than 1.6 million verified sales transactions, 8.4 million rental contracts and hundreds of thousands of active listings. Daleel is also releasing its full API and Model Context Protocol integration from day one, positioning itself as foundational infrastructure that developers, brokerages, lenders and institutional investors can build upon.
The funding will support continued product development, mobile applications and expansion into Abu Dhabi and other emirates, with groundwork already underway for Saudi Arabia as new ownership laws come into effect in 2026.
With over $300bn in annual real estate transactions across the GCC, and increasing foreign participation, the founders believe the region is ready for a unified intelligence layer.
Daleel’s ambition is to become the reference point for verified property intelligence across the Gulf – replacing fragmented, opaque workflows with a single source of truth built for the AI era.
