Ilan Cohen spent more than five years selling properties in Dubai, closing over AED 450 million in transactions across both off-plan and secondary markets. He knew exactly how the market worked, and how broken it was for everyone.

"I couldn't give buyers a straight answer on whether the price was fair," Ilan said. "I'd spend hours pulling government records, cross-referencing three different listing portals, and manually building analyses. The data existed. Connecting it all still took hours.”

That opacity, he realized, wasn't a bug. It was how the industry worked. Sellers could list at any price. Buyers had no way to verify. Agents held all the information. In a market where a single transaction might be someone's largest financial decision, everyone was navigating blind.

Ilan teamed up with Ely Weichsel, who spent more than ten years building AI platforms for Fortune 500 companies, and launched Daleel, Arabic for "guide". The company has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding from a prominent real estate investor and business angel with deep ties to the Dubai property market. It's the largest pre-seed round ever raised for AI-native real estate, and it came from the Gulf, not the US.

"We're building the intelligence layer for GCC real estate," Ilan said. "Every transaction, every rental contract, every mortgage. Unified, verified, and accessible through conversation. Dubai is where we start. The Gulf is where we're going."

The GCC real estate market represents over $300 billion in annual transactions across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. Saudi Arabia is opening its market to foreign ownership through new laws effective January 2026, allowing resident expatriates to purchase one residential property and enabling non-residents to invest in Saudi real estate for the first time.

Yet no platform unifies official government transaction data with live listings through AI powered analysis across the region. Existing portals were designed two decades ago for human browsing. Daleel is different. It was built from the ground up for AI.

Daleel operates under Dubai Land Department's Real Estate Evolution Space (REES) program, a government backed initiative advancing innovation, technology, and data within Dubai real estate. This positions Daleel at the center of Dubai's push to modernize its property ecosystem.

The platform has direct access to historical transaction data going back as far as DLD records exist: actual sale prices, not asking prices; actual rental contracts from Ejari, not landlord wishlists; mortgage registrations, construction progress, and service charges.

That data is unified with live listings from every major portal, deduplicated so each property appears once regardless of how many platforms list it.

Users interact through conversation. "What's my expected net return if I buy this unit and rent at current market rates?" "Alert me when a unit hits the market at 15% below comparable sales in the same building." "Find me a 3-bedroom under AED 2 million within a 10-minute drive of my son's school at morning drop-off." Daleel responds with verified government data, live listings, and real-time market activity. What took Ilan hours now takes seconds.

"We didn't add AI to a listing database," said Ely. "We built the architecture from the ground up for machine learning. The data model is designed for AI reasoning, with relationships between properties, transactions, developers, and buildings. That's fundamentally different from a searchable inventory."

Daleel officially launched Wednesday at PropTech Connect Dubai. The platform goes live with Dubai as its first market: more than 1.6 million verified sales transactions, 8.4 million rental contracts from Ejari, and 874,000 live listings from every major portal, for a total of billions of data relationships powering every query. For developers, Daleel is releasing its full API and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration from day one, positioning the platform as infrastructure others can build on.

The company spent two months in closed beta with licensed agents, institutional investors, and developers before launching publicly. To celebrate the public launch, the first 100 subscribers receive founding member pricing, locked in forever. "We want the people who believe in this early to benefit as we scale," Ilan said.

The $3 million will fund product development, mobile apps, and expansion to Abu Dhabi and other emirates. The team is also laying groundwork for Saudi Arabia as the Kingdom opens its doors to foreign property ownership.

"Saudi is at an inflection point," Ilan said. "New ownership laws, government pushing digital transformation, and no dominant platform yet. The incumbents are trying to replicate their UAE playbook with listing databases plus AI features. We're coming in AI native with government data integration from day one. That's a different product entirely."

The play is to establish Daleel as critical infrastructure before the market consolidates, the layer that brokerages, developers, banks, and individual buyers all rely on for verified market intelligence.

"Think about what Bloomberg did for financial markets," Ely said. "Before Bloomberg, traders were calling around for prices. Bloomberg unified the data and became indispensable. Real estate in the Gulf is still in the calling around phase. We're building the terminal."

It's an ambitious comparison for a pre-seed company. But Ilan, who's seen the industry from inside, argues the timing is now. The technology is ready. The market is ready.

"AI is transforming every sector," he said. "Real estate is one of the hottest, and the Gulf is leading the charge. We're giving buyers, investors, and agents the power to make instant decisions with total clarity. With Daleel, the market will never work the same way again."