Former Starwood and Morgan Stanley lenders close a round led by Cowboy Ventures to automate the manual work behind every commercial real estate loan
NEW YORK, October 15, 2026–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CarbonAI, the agentic AI platform for commercial real estate (CRE) lending, today announced $12 million in funding led by Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Timber Grove Ventures, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures. In an era where CRE lenders face more pressure than ever to make high-quality investments at a frenetic pace, CarbonAI brings reliable automation and time savings with purpose built agents that run the core analytical work of a loan, from underwriting and due diligence to post-close monitoring.
CRE is a $20 trillion market in the U.S., yet most lending work still runs on spreadsheets and manual document review. The industry faces a “wall of maturities” – according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, $875 billion in commercial mortgages mature in 2026 – and many more loans are expected to require lender intervention as interest rates continue to rise. CRE lending teams already spend an estimated $50 billion annually to underwrite new and existing loans held on book and, increasingly, teams are not scaling to meet the challenge. As a result, lenders either slow their decisions or approve deals with less review than the risk requires.
Carbon’s long-horizon agents solve this resource crunch by automating analytical work in CRE lending including underwriting, due diligence and quarterly surveillance. Carbon agents extract and structure data from rent rolls, leases, financial statements, and legal documents, then autonomously build the underwriting, draft the investment memo, and flag risks for review. Each output links back to its source document, and the agents route decisions that require human judgment to the lending team. After a loan closes, the same system monitors it continuously to proactively surface risks rather than waiting on a manual quarterly review.
“Josh (Kaufman, co-founder) and I spent the early years of our careers buried in the same manual work Carbon now automates,” said Jeff Saul, Co-founder and CEO of CarbonAI. “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.”
After launching its first product suite in early 2025, Carbon helped its early customers save as much as 90% of time on core underwriting tasks like lease review, financial statement analysis and loan onboarding. As a result, Carbon achieved 7-figures of contractual revenue within 6 months of that launch and now counts among its customers some of the largest firms in CRE including debt funds, mortgage REITs, agency multifamily lenders, and publicly traded financial institutions.
“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,” said Mordecai Rosenberg, Co-President of Greystone. “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.”
Co-founders Jeff Saul and Josh Kaufman began their careers underwriting and managing CRE loans at firms including Starwood Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Guggenheim. They went on to build Nativ, a CRE deal management platform that grew quickly to working with over 30 lenders across over $300B of AUM by working with lenders’ native workflow (excel models, report formats) rather than replacing it, and sold it to Built, where both held leadership roles at the Series D stage company.
“When we first met Carbon, some of the top lenders in commercial real estate were already customers,” said Caroline Duffy, Partner at Cowboy Ventures. “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.”
About CarbonAI
CarbonAI builds AI agents for commercial real estate lending teams. Carbon’s agents run the analytical work across the full life of the loan, from pre-close underwriting and due diligence to investment memos and post-close surveillance, with a complete audit trail back to the source document on every figure. Founded by longtime CRE lenders and technologists, Carbon works with debt funds, mortgage REITs, agency lenders, and publicly traded companies. The company is headquartered in New York’s Flatiron district. Learn more at carboncre.ai.
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