Thanks to artificial intelligence, proptech founders can build products faster than ever. But getting real estate agents to use what they build hasn’t gotten any easier.
Katherine Winston
That’s the premise behind Equity Angels’ third cohort, announced Tuesday, which is the Bellevue, Washington-based accelerator’s first program built entirely around go-to-market strategy.
Four proptech founders will spend six weeks working with marketing, media and growth leaders to build a go-to-market blueprint and a 90-day action plan, then pitch both to advisors and investors at a Demo Day on Dec. 1.
“Artificial intelligence lets founders 10X their product output overnight, but it can’t 10X human adoption,” Katherine Winston, co-founder and managing partner of Equity Angels, said in a statement. “The fundamentals of sales, marketing and relationship-building are more critical than ever. That’s why we’re bringing founders together with seasoned growth leaders to build go-to-market systems that scale in this new era.”
Meet the cohort
The cohort spans four corners of the real estate industry.
Sissi Xi Wang’s Brokrly unifies a brokerage’s operational and transactional data into a single source of truth for business intelligence. Kuvaal Patel’s Sayso feeds agents real-time, predictive scripting while they’re still on the line.
Jamal Jones’ Velasight scores census tracts for multifamily developers and family offices deciding whether a site is worth pursuing. And Tom Gabriele’s Wispr gives agents a cross-brokerage marketplace for pre-market and off-market listings and buyer searches. Wispr says 25 percent of the pre-market opportunities shared on its platform have converted to executed agreements.
Easy to build, hard to sell
For Patel, the gap Winston describes between building products and getting agents to adopt them isn’t theoretical.
Kuvaal Patel
Patel got his start in direct sales and, according to Equity Angels, sold more than 40 homes in his first 18 months as a licensed real estate agent before helping grow a real estate team to 60 agents as a Zillow partner.
Sayso, which he describes as “a live conversational intelligence layer,” listens to calls between salespeople and prospects, whether those are agents, commercial brokers or brokerage recruiters, and prompts them on screen with what to ask, what to say and how to handle objections.
Patel told Inman he has a dedicated development team building the product, not an AI coding agent. But he said he knows how easy it’s become to spin up features, and how fragile they can be.
“I could probably build something to add onto Sayso myself,” Patel told Inman. “It would probably be a house-of-cards-style feature that might break after a couple of days if there were too many users on it.”
The harder problem, he said, shows up in sales calls. The objections he hears most often from prospective customers are whether their agents will actually use the tool, and whether they’ll remember to.
“This product is great, but if I can’t get people to use it, then it’s just going to be another project that sits on the shelf,” Patel said of the realization he had a couple of months after reaching a working minimum viable product (MVP).
That has also shaped how Sayso handles feature requests from existing clients. Some ideas get serious consideration, Patel said, but others are easy to ship and don’t move the needle.
“It’s a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have that moves the revenue needle,” he said. “So the basis is finding the things people are actually going to use that actually solve the problem, and then building in a way that’s sustainable.”
Patel said he came into the program knowing outbound cold calling and little else about marketing, and that the first few weeks of the accelerator have pushed him to narrow down Sayso’s positioning and messaging.
“Coming from a sales background, I tend to overexplain quite a lot,” he said. His 90-day plan will likely center on two or three channels identified through testing, paired with that refined messaging.
Technology is changing real estate faster than most of us can keep up. November is Proptech Month. We’ll go deep on the startups building what comes next and ask who’s actually shaping the future.
What success looks like by April
Winston leads the program alongside co-lead Natalia Iragorri, who built creator and brand education programs at YouTube and Twitter (now X). The advisory group includes Marci James, founder of Be Inspired Digital, an eight-year Realtor.com veteran, and an Inman contributor; Juan Cubillos, CEO of AntPack; and Craig Rowe, a longtime real estate technology columnist for Inman who also advises proptech companies.
Equity Angels will follow up with the cohort through April 2027 to track results. Winston and co-founder Kenya Burrell-VanWormer were named Inman’s 2025 Innovators of the Year.
For Patel, success by the April check-in will come down to revenue benchmarks, introductions to advisors and investors, and whether the channels he picks actually pay off.
“You can have an amazing product,” Patel said, “but if you don’t have customers on it, you really don’t have much at all.”
