CarbonAI has raised $12 million for AI agents that do the analytical grunt work behind commercial property loans. Cowboy Ventures led the round, with participation from Timber Grove Ventures, Bling Capital and Max Ventures. The company did not disclose a funding stage or a valuation.
The New York company's agents handle underwriting, due diligence and post-close monitoring. They pull figures from rent rolls, leases, financial statements and legal documents, then build the underwriting model and draft the credit memo. They also flag risks. Each number links back to the document it came from, and any decision that needs human judgment goes to the lending team. CarbonAI sells only in the United States.
The company was founded by Jeff Saul and Josh Kaufman, who both underwrote commercial property loans at Starwood Capital, Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim. They later built a deal platform called Nativ and sold it to Built. Greystone is the only customer the company names. CarbonAI says its other customers include debt funds, mortgage real estate investment trusts and agency multifamily lenders.
The product lands in a regulatory gray area in Europe. The EU AI Act classes systems used to evaluate the creditworthiness of natural persons, or to set their credit scores, as high-risk. Companies are not natural persons, so the same software would fall outside that rule when used for corporate lending. The line gets blurry quickly, though. Commercial property loans routinely carry personal guarantees from sponsors, and the provision applies once an individual's creditworthiness is assessed. Those obligations have been pushed back to December 2027.
Other AI underwriting firms are testing the same boundary. Vesta raised $30 million last week for agents that make mortgage decisions, a use the EU treats far more strictly. Berlin's Taktile raised $110 million in June for agents that underwrite business loans, and it sits outside the same provision for the same reason.
CarbonAI's pitch rests on the size of the market it is chasing. The announcement cites a $20 trillion U.S. commercial property market and $875 billion in mortgages maturing this year, according to Mortgage Bankers Association figures. Lenders spend roughly $50 billion a year underwriting those loans, a cost base that gives software vendors room to compete.
Europe's picture looks different. Lenders there are competing for fewer deals as interest rates stay high, Bloomberg reported, squeezing their margins. Revolut's property lending chief left this month, less than two years after being hired to build the business.
The company's own numbers are the ones to watch. CarbonAI says it has seven-figure contracted revenue within six months of launch and that its tools save up to 90% of time on selected underwriting tasks. It has not explained how it measured that time savings. A British-founded firm, Build, makes a similar pitch for data center underwriting and claims savings of more than 95%.
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