Brendan Wallace has spent much of the past decade investing in technology that impacts how real estate is bought, built and managed. Now, the Fifth Wall co-founder sees AI changing the kinds of companies worth backing and expanding the definition of proptech itself.
Founded in 2016, Los Angeles-based Fifth Wall has grown into one of the largest investment firms focused on real estate technology, with roughly $3 billion in commitments and capital under management. Its portfolio includes Procore, OpenDoor, Blend and Hippo.
Notable exits include ServiceTitan, which went public in 2024, and flexible workspace provider Industrious, which real estate giant CBRE took full ownership of in January 2025 at a valuation of more than $800 million.
Major real estate and hospitality companies — including CBRE, Hines, Hilton and Marriott — are among its investors, giving the startups it backs a direct connection to potential customers.
Wallace, who serves as CEO and chief investment officer, brings experience on both sides of that relationship. He worked in real estate finance at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone before co-founding workforce analytics startup Identified, which was acquired by Workday in 2014, and ridesharing company Cabify.
As AI makes certain products easier to replicate, Wallace sees growing potential in startups that use technology to own and operate real estate themselves.
In a recent interview with Crunchbase News, we discussed that shift, why proptech funding totals may overlook some of the sector’s biggest investments, what it all means for founders, and the housing problems he believes still need solving.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Crunchbase News: Our recent proptech funding analysis showed capital on pace to roughly match or slightly exceed last year, but across fewer deals. What does that tell you about the market?
Brendan Wallace: My sense is that statistic might belie the actual amount of funding flowing in, because what was previously characterized as proptech in the narrowest sense is probably representing a smaller share of where proptech investors are deploying capital.
There are increasingly horizontal solutions that are just as good, if not better, than many of the vertical solutions we’re seeing. We recently made a very big investment out of our growth fund into Higgsfield, the visualization software company. Most people reflexively think of that as being for movies or rendering scenes. But we saw real estate agents and commercial leasing brokers using it to represent spaces.
For an unbuilt home, you could feed it blueprints, have it build an entire home, put your family inside and walk through it in a full scene. That had surpassed the industry-specific solutions for space visualization that would have been narrowly defined as proptech.
Another category is investment flowing into full-stack businesses: real estate companies themselves. We just invested $135 million into Atoms, and I would be surprised if that fell under the definition of proptech.
Those are probably the two categories that might not be captured: horizontal software, with Higgsfield as an example, and businesses that reimagine physical space based on autonomy, AI or robotics. They’re actually building a physical thing. They’re building a real estate company, directly or indirectly.
How much is AI driving that shift toward software that serves multiple industries?
Wallace: It’s a big part of it. Without something profoundly better that you can’t replicate on your own, there’s less justification for buying outside software. There still is a justification, to be clear. There’s just less of one.
No real estate company can build the kind of visualization software Higgsfield has. I don’t believe they ever will. But a tenant engagement app they might have previously purchased and rolled out to their assets, they can now replicate over a long weekend.
The imperative to buy these third-party solutions has been reduced, and more value has been placed on the best horizontal solutions, whether that’s a foundation model or a specific use case like sound, audio or visual.
I don’t know the statistic, but it would be interesting to know how much real estate companies are spending on foundation models versus proptech applications. If I had to guess, we’re probably close to, or at, an inflection point where it’s passing it.
No one would characterize Anthropic as a proptech company, but it might be taking a significant amount of the upstream proptech dollars, and an even larger share downstream once you go through the application layer.
Has AI reset the bar for what makes a venture-scale proptech software company? What does a startup need beyond adding AI to existing workflows?
Wallace: We’re still figuring that out, but I think it has to be something that can’t be replicated. Anything where the intellectual property moat is not extremely defensible is very challenged, and I think it will be for some time.
Simple application point solutions are becoming less financeable by venture investors because the capacity of one of the large labs to build that as an interface, or of a company to build it on its own, has caught up so dramatically.
The flip side is that bespoke AI development labs are now building solutions for the real estate industry. We backed one called Antares, which is kind of like a Palantir for real estate. Antares works with a number of our strategic limited partners. They go in-house, identify a problem they think can be solved with an AI-based solution, build the intellectual property specifically for the organization, and leave it with them.
It’s more of a fee-for-development model than an intellectual property licensing model. You’re seeing that across industries, and you’re absolutely seeing it in real estate.
In some sectors, founders argue that domain expertise gives specialized AI companies an advantage over broad models. How durable do you think that advantage is?
Wallace: I’m a little more optimistic about foundation models’ and general intelligence’s capacity to adapt rapidly to specific use cases.
I wouldn’t argue that specific legal expertise, for example, is not valuable. But I think that moat collapses over time. You might be on a treadmill.
Think about what ChatGPT looked like in 2023 versus what Claude looks like today. At a basic level, it’s the same thing, but they’re totally different things. The sophistication, memory, capacity to be personalized, and ability to build off natural language instructions are unlike anything I think anyone could have anticipated in 2023.
What will that look like in 2029? I think what you’re saying is true today. It’s less true than it was, and it might become even less true in three years.
Is construction technology still an area of focus for Fifth Wall?
Wallace: It is, but it’s less of a focus today. When we look at our performance, it has generally favored two things: pure software businesses, whether marketplaces, consumer software or enterprise software, and full-stack businesses.
Anytime you get into physically doing things, the risk profile changes pretty profoundly. I don’t think it should be surprising that construction tech broadly is probably the biggest graveyard in all of venture. Maybe there’s a bigger category, but if there is, it’s not obvious to me.
Why do you think construction tech continues to attract significant funding?
Wallace: Because it’s still a massive market and a huge problem. If someone can bring greater efficiency to construction, you’re talking about one of the largest markets on earth. It’s such a massive prize that the largest funds are going to focus on it.
For founders raising seed or Series A funding, what opportunities would you encourage them to pursue that might not have been fundable a few years ago?
Wallace: You can actually build new real estate companies. That hasn’t really been conceptualized as being within a venture mandate, but it’s absolutely something we’d like to see.
For example, we have a better approach to buying multifamily assets, stripping out costs, and running more of the processes, operations and management with AI. That’s something I think is eminently fundable today by Fifth Wall and many venture funds. I don’t think that would have been the case five years ago.
I’d encourage founders to look at building full-stack, capital-R real estate businesses.
The second opportunity is around data. Real estate is characterized by extremely opaque data in a way that’s different from most large financial markets. Nothing that’s happened in proptech in the past 10 years has fundamentally changed that.
Where can generative AI provide signal through that opaque data to make capital allocation decisions? Real estate is generally a cash-flowing asset. We don’t necessarily think of it as comparable to bonds or stocks, but it is, and it should be.
Can you derive signal by looking at more data or different data, or use generative AI to predict what kind of real estate will perform better? The quantitative model that has existed for securities for a very long time now has the potential to affect real estate, because we have computational capacity that wasn’t previously possible.
Are there opportunities you’re interested in that have less to do with AI?
Wallace: We’re intrigued by the intersection of land, real estate and the financial instruments around them. To make most of what we describe as real estate, you usually have to build something on land. Land is an input to almost all real estate, but many real estate owners don’t want to own it or take on that risk profile.
Is there a way to decouple having to own land from owning and operating a building? That’s less about AI and more about financial engineering. There are new financial solutions emerging in that category that interest us.
How could AI, robotics and autonomy change the kinds of real estate businesses founders build?
Wallace: I’m interested in entrepreneurs who can conceptualize real estate through a sociological lens: New catalysts are changing how humans use space compared with the past.
That’s happened for a long time. E-commerce built the modern industrial real estate industry. Cloud computing, the internet and now AI built the data center industry. Cell towers were born out of mobile phones and smartphone technology. Genome sequencing helped create the lab-space real estate asset class.
I think we’re on the precipice of three new catalysts that will spawn entirely new real estate asset classes: AI, robotics and autonomy. In many ways, they’re entangled.
Do you expect fewer dedicated proptech venture firms? What would that mean for founders?
Wallace: I do think you’re going to see fewer vertical funds, in the narrowest sense of where we started this conversation. Dedicated venture capital funds investing in consumer and enterprise software focused on an industry —– I think you’ll see less of that, and funding will probably continue to go down in that category.
The inverse is venture capital funding real estate businesses themselves. I think that’s about to explode.
If you were starting a company in this sector today, what problem would you most want to solve?
Wallace: Housing drives everything. Housing costs drive our economy, and the U.S. is grappling with a very real housing affordability crisis. It’s unclear how to solve it.
There are multiple approaches. One is building homes better, faster and cheaper — that’s construction tech. Another is financing homes at a lower cost. How do you bring efficiency to the housing finance market?
That’s a place where we’ve made a lot of money and invested a lot, but I would argue it’s still unsolved. Getting a mortgage is still painful, archaic, slow and too expensive.
Related to that is making regulation more efficient to improve housing affordability. That’s not something an entrepreneur can solve alone, but there’s potential to bring efficiency to how cities deal with this problem.
There’s an intersection of regulatory technology, policy work and consulting. How do we make it so more people can afford homes in the cities they live in? That problem isn’t going away. Despite everything that’s happened, housing has gotten more expensive, not less.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
