Chicago-based Antares Labs, a builder of custom artificial intelligence solutions for real estate operations, is announcing its launch with a $7.25 million seed round, Commercial Observer has learned. 

Proptech venture capital firm Fifth Wall led the round, alongside an investor list of Base10 Partners, Bloomberg Beta and Sandwith Ventures. 

Noaman Ahmad, Antares Labs’ co-founder and CEO, previously served as chief financial officer at proptech company Doma and tech consultancy firm Keystone. Ahmad told Commercial Observer that he observed a gap between the real estate industry’s rich data and its uptake of technologies that could help them make the fullest use of it. 

“Most of these companies have now realized that they need to do something using the power of AI, because if they don’t, they’re going to lose the competitive edge over the next year or two years,” Ahmad said.

Antares Labs’ tailor-made AI systems digest and build upon clients’ institutional knowledge, proprietary data and workflows. Antares’ current client, real estate developer and investment manager Quarterra, is using these services to identify and target new submarkets and land parcels, Ahmad said. 

“We’re coming to market with a very different angle on this,” Ahmad said. “We’re not bringing a tool. We’re not building an agent for them. We’re talking to them about how they think about AI broadly across their enterprise.”

Other use cases of Antares Labs’ consultancy model include shrinking the time between tenant departures and arrivals for a shopping center-focused real estate investment trust, and discovering current and future inventory insights for an industrial landlord.

Antares Labs’ platforms are built to be model-agnostic, meaning that a client can take their pick of providers like OpenAI or Gemini, and easily adjust according to needs or cost pressures. 

Los Angeles-based Fifth Wall backs some of the largest leaders in the proptech space, including Opendoor and Bilt Rewards. It backed the launch and $5 million seed round of smart home system One Raven in early July, as well as participated in a $1.7 billion funding round for former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s robotics company, Atoms.

Emily Davis can be reached at edavis@commercialobserver.com.