Startup Watch: AIRE Brings Five-Day AI Feasibility Studies to Africa’s Property Markets

Startup Watch

Dubai / Nairobi  |  4 August 2026  |  Property News Africa

A development feasibility study is a document that decides whether capital moves. Across much of Africa, it has also been one of the slowest and most expensive steps in the pipeline — six weeks and a five-figure fee before a developer knows whether a site is worth pursuing at all. AIRE — Artificial Intelligence in Real Estate — has built its business on the premise that this bottleneck is solvable, and that solving it opens the market to a far wider set of players.

The Dubai-headquartered firm, founded in 2023 and running regional offices in Casablanca and Nairobi, says its proprietary platform produces full feasibility and Highest & Best Use studies in five business days, against the four to six weeks a conventional consultancy would take. The company is led by founder and chief executive Simon Ardonceau.

AIRE supplied written responses to questions from Property News Africa. Its recent trajectory is well documented: the company announced its expansion into Saudi Arabia and the UAE in October 2025, launched a hospitality-focused platform in March 2026 ahead of the Future Hospitality Summit in Nairobi, and stepped up its Morocco and Saudi engagements through the second quarter of this year.

How six weeks becomes five days

AIRE Software runs feasibility studies and Highest & Best Use analysis across hospitality, residential, retail, office and mixed-use assets. The output is the pack an investment committee expects: market and demand assessment, optimal use scenarios, and financial modelling covering internal rate of return, net present value, cash-flow projections and sensitivity analysis.

What differs is the input layer. The company says the platform draws on proprietary datasets combined with regional market intelligence — supply and demand analytics, tourism performance, competitive benchmarking and macroeconomic indicators — rather than assembling comparables from scratch for every mandate. That is the mechanism behind the speed: the data-gathering that consumes most of a traditional study’s timeline is already done and continuously maintained. Outputs are then reviewed and adjusted by AIRE’s own sector consultants before they reach a client, so the product pairs automation with human sign-off rather than replacing the analyst outright.

The software sits alongside three other divisions — AIRE Consulting, AIRE Valuations and AIRE Hospitality — and the company has said its consulting, valuation and hospitality lines provide a recurring revenue base while software drives growth. That structure is worth noting: AIRE is a working advisory firm that built a tool, not a pure software play looking for a use case. Coverage now spans Kenya, Morocco, Mauritius, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

AIRE at a glance

Four markets, four very different briefs

AIRE offered four engagements as reference points, and the spread is telling in itself. In Abu Dhabi, the platform assessed market and financial viability for a premium villa development. In Upper Hill, Nairobi, it evaluated an office scheme built for sale. In Cocody, Abidjan, it ran a full mixed-use assessment across hospitality, residential, office and retail segments to identify the highest and best use. In Lomé, Togo, it modelled a mixed-use development across its full delivery cycle.

Abidjan and Lomé are the interesting entries. Both are markets where reliable comparable evidence is genuinely scarce and where most international advisory firms have little standing capability — which is precisely where a maintained regional dataset earns its keep.

Client names are confidential, as in most advisory work, so these engagements are described rather than independently verified.

Hotels, the Gulf and a busy twelve months

Two of AIRE’s recent milestones are well documented. The hospitality-focused feasibility platform launched on 2 March 2026, timed to the Future Hospitality Summit Africa in Nairobi and FHS Saudi Arabia in Riyadh — a sensible move given how much of the pipeline across Morocco, Kenya and the Red Sea coast is hotel and resort product. The Saudi and UAE expansion followed a broader software release in October 2025 that widened coverage to seven markets.

The company also reports selection as a semifinalist in the Cityscape Innovation Challenge 2026 and a nomination for the NextGen Innovation Award at the Global PropTech & ConTech Awards 2026. Both are meaningful programmes — the Cityscape challenge shortlists 60 semifinalists to pitch at the world’s largest real estate exhibition in Riyadh, and the NextGen category recognises early-stage companies bringing breakthrough technology to the built environment. Property News Africa was not able to match these against published organiser lists at the time of writing, so we report them as company-stated pending confirmation from the organisers. Alongside these, AIRE has introduced scenario modelling spanning single assets, mixed-use schemes and master-planned projects.

There is no CoStar for Abidjan

AIRE is riding a wave that turned institutional this year. On 30 June 2026, US platform Zenerate announced a partnership with AvalonBay Communities, one of America’s largest apartment owners, to run early-stage multifamily feasibility before capital is committed. In July, Antares Labs launched with a US$7.25 million seed round backed by Fifth Wall and Bloomberg Beta to build AI for large real estate institutions. AI-assisted feasibility is no longer a pitch-deck concept; it is becoming standard practice at the top of the market.

AIRE’s position within that shift has a distinctly African characteristic. It is privately funded with no disclosed venture backing, and it operates in markets where the underlying data is thinner than anything a US platform contends with. That is the harder problem — and it is also the more defensible one. No equivalent data infrastructure exists for these cities. A firm that has spent three years assembling supply pipelines, rate evidence and demand indicators for Casablanca, Nairobi and Lomé holds something that cannot be replicated by pointing a better model at a market with no records in it. The data moat, not the algorithm, is the asset.

Where to find AIRE

AIRE works with developers, landowners, institutional investors, family offices and hotel operators across Africa and the Middle East, with teams in Dubai, Casablanca and Nairobi. Alongside the software platform, the firm offers traditional feasibility studies, valuations, hospitality advisory and full development consulting — so a client can start with a rapid screening study and move into deeper advisory on the schemes that justify it.

Developers weighing a site — a resort on the Moroccan coast, an office development in Upper Hill, a mixed-use plot in Abidjan — can approach the team directly for a scoping conversation.

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