The MLS reduces every home to a spreadsheet row — a luxury renovation with solar panels looks identical to a 1970s flip. Buyers can't search for what actually matters to them. Sellers spend years perfecting a home, then hand the first impression to a yard sign with a contact form nobody checks. Agents field unqualified leads all day. The infrastructure is 30 years old and it shows.
Brian built Alma after putting his own house on the market. The agent placed a yard sign with a text short code promising photos and info. He texted it. It returned a broken, scammy message with nothing. He pulled the sign out of the yard and built a better product.
Each listing gets a dedicated website with a 24/7 AI that knows the home inside and out — not just the square footage, but the light, the character, the details that make someone fall in love with it. Buyers ask questions and get real answers, any hour. Agents receive warm, pre-qualified leads.
The key difference: Alma's AI is in the buyer's corner. It's not trying to sell this house — it wants the buyer to find the right house. That's a structurally different posture than every other piece of real estate software, which is built for high-volume brokers and the agents who write the checks.
Not a portal. Zillow and Redfin are listing aggregators — search engines for real estate. Alma is the home itself, talking. It's the engagement layer that lives on every listing, every sign, every agent's site. Zillow shows you what's available. Alma helps you figure out what you actually want.
When a buyer asks about natural light in three different listings, asks about noise levels, asks about outdoor space — Alma is learning how they actually live. Not filters. Real intent. Across enough listings in a market, Alma builds a per-buyer preference model and starts matching proactively. That's when buyers come to Alma before Zillow. The agent tool is Phase 1. That's Phase 2.
At close, Alma transfers to the buyer and keeps growing — tracking renovations, maintenance, and receipts. When it's time to sell again, the listing writes itself. One click, years of context. Alma becomes a lifelong home companion, not a tool you use twice in a decade.
Per-buyer preference data from millions of real conversations is irreplicable — Zillow has search behavior, Alma has conversations. And buyer trust: Alma is the only platform in the stack that is structurally on the buyer's side. That trust, at scale, is the real asset.
Former CTO of Ceros (12 years, 0 → $50M ARR, scaled product org to 100). Planned a sabbatical after leaving. Instead, spent months selling his own home — a place he'd poured years into making special — and realized that none of the tools could convey what actually made it worth buying. The MLS flattened it into a spreadsheet row. The agent's yard sign returned a broken text message. He pulled the sign out of the ground and built Alma.
Key hires with funding: GTM Lead + Founding Engineer / CTO
SAFEs. 18–24 months to prove the model in Atlanta, then replicate nationally.