CarbonAI has raised $12 million in funding to expand its agentic AI platform for commercial real estate lending, helping lenders automate underwriting, due diligence, investment memo creation, and post-close loan monitoring. The round was led by Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Timber Grove Ventures, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures. CarbonAI is focused on replacing manual analytical work across the commercial real estate lending lifecycle with purpose-built AI agents.
Commercial real estate represents an approximately $20 trillion market in the U.S., while much of the lending process continues to rely on spreadsheets and manual document review. CarbonAI is targeting that operational burden as lenders contend with a large volume of maturing commercial mortgages and increasing pressure to evaluate existing and prospective loans efficiently.
Carbon’s AI agents extract and structure information from rent rolls, leases, financial statements, and legal documents. The platform can then build underwriting analyses, draft investment memos, identify potential risks, and route decisions requiring human judgment to lending teams. Each output is linked back to its underlying source document to provide an audit trail.
After a loan closes, the same technology can continuously monitor the asset and surface potential risks instead of relying exclusively on periodic manual reviews. Carbon is designed to work within the workflows and analytical processes already used by commercial real estate lenders rather than requiring teams to replace their existing operating models.
The company launched its first product suite in early 2025 and said customers have reduced the time required for certain core underwriting tasks, including lease reviews, financial statement analysis, and loan onboarding, by as much as 90%. Carbon reached seven figures of contractual revenue within six months of launch.
Its customers now include debt funds, mortgage REITs, agency multifamily lenders, and publicly traded financial institutions. Greystone is among the companies using Carbon to automate due diligence collection within its underwriting process.
CarbonAI was founded by Jeff Saul and Josh Kaufman, who previously worked in commercial real estate lending at firms including Starwood Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Guggenheim. The pair later founded Nativ, a commercial real estate deal management platform that worked with more than 30 lenders representing over $300 billion in assets under management before being acquired by Built.
The New York-based company is positioning its AI agents as specialized systems trained around commercial real estate workflows, with the goal of allowing lending professionals to spend less time gathering and processing information and more time making underwriting and portfolio management decisions.
KEY QUOTES:
“Josh and I spent the early years of our careers buried in the same manual work Carbon now automates. Lenders don’t need another chat window that they have to coach through every step. They need agents that already know the job, do it end to end consistently, and show their work, so their teams can spend their time on the judgment calls to make more, high-quality loans and protect their existing book. That’s the tool we needed when we were analysts, so it’s the one we built.”
Jeff Saul, Co-Founder And CEO Of CarbonAI
“Carbon was a clear choice and natural partner to us to automate due diligence collection: one of the most significant yet overlooked bottlenecks in underwriting. They won us over because they listen. Rather than pushing a solution in search of a problem, Jeff and the team took the time to understand our underwriting challenges and deliver a solution that actually fits our business. They ship fast, and their point of view on where automated CRE work is headed has been invaluable.”
Mordecai Rosenberg, Co-President Of Greystone
“When we first met Carbon, some of the top lenders in commercial real estate were already customers. Those lenders told us two things: First, generic tools don’t work in a business this complex, where the data is messy and the margin for error is close to zero; Second, they only wanted to work with people who came from their world. Jeff and Josh spent their careers in commercial real estate lending, then built and scaled the software they wish they had. That combination is why the best lenders trust them.”
Caroline Duffy, Partner At Cowboy Ventures
