CarbonAI, a New York-based artificial intelligence startup focused on commercial real estate (CRE) lending, has raised $12 million in funding led by Cowboy Ventures. Timber Grove Ventures, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures also participated in the round.

Founded by former commercial real estate lenders Jeff Saul and Josh Kaufman, CarbonAI develops AI agents that automate analytical work throughout the life of a commercial property loan. Its platform covers underwriting, due diligence, investment memo preparation, and post-closing loan monitoring.

The company plans to address a persistent challenge in commercial real estate finance: lending teams still rely heavily on spreadsheets, manual document reviews, and repetitive analysis to evaluate deals and monitor existing loans.

According to the company, its first product suite helped early customers reduce the time spent on core underwriting tasks by as much as 90%. CarbonAI also reports reaching seven-figure contractual revenue within six months of launching the product suite in early 2025.

What Does CarbonAI Do?

CarbonAI builds AI agents specifically for commercial real estate lending teams. Rather than offering a general-purpose chatbot, the platform is designed to carry out defined lending workflows, process financial and legal documents, and produce analytical outputs for review by lending professionals.

Commercial real estate loans often involve reviewing large volumes of documentation, including rent rolls, lease agreements, financial statements, and legal records. Lenders need to extract relevant information, assess financial performance, identify risks, and prepare materials that support investment decisions.

CarbonAI's agents automate several of these activities. The system extracts and structures information from source documents, builds underwriting analyses, drafts investment memos, and flags potential risks for human review.

Each output links back to its source document, providing an audit trail that allows lending teams to check the underlying information. Decisions requiring human judgment are routed to the appropriate team members.

The company says this approach allows lenders to automate repetitive analytical work while retaining human oversight over important credit and investment decisions.

AI Agents Across the Entire Loan Lifecycle

CarbonAI's platform is designed to support lending operations from initial underwriting through ongoing loan management.

1. Automated Underwriting

Underwriting requires lenders to evaluate a property's financial performance, examine borrower information, and assess whether a proposed loan meets investment criteria.

CarbonAI's agents process relevant documents and organise the information needed for analysis. The platform can build underwriting outputs and prepare supporting materials, reducing the amount of manual document handling required from analysts.

The company says its system helped early customers save up to 90% of the time spent on core underwriting tasks, including lease review, financial statement analysis, and loan onboarding. This is a company-reported result rather than an independently verified industry-wide benchmark.

2. Due Diligence and Investment Memos

Due diligence involves collecting and reviewing documents to identify financial, legal, and operational issues that could affect a transaction.

CarbonAI automates parts of this process by extracting information from source documents and preparing structured outputs. Its agents can also draft investment memos and flag potential risks for the lending team to assess.

Greystone, a commercial real estate lending and finance company, is among the customers referenced in the announcement.

Mordecai Rosenberg, Co-President of Greystone, said the company selected CarbonAI to automate due diligence collection, describing it as a significant but often overlooked bottleneck in underwriting.

Rosenberg also highlighted CarbonAI's willingness to understand existing underwriting challenges and adapt its solution to the customer's workflows.

3. Post-Closing Loan Monitoring

A lender's work does not end when a loan closes. Existing loans need to be monitored for changes that could affect repayment, property performance, or overall credit risk.

CarbonAI's agents continue monitoring loans after closing, aiming to identify emerging risks before a scheduled manual review.

The company says its platform can surface relevant information continuously rather than relying solely on periodic quarterly surveillance.

This capability is particularly relevant for lenders managing large portfolios, where manually reviewing every loan and its associated documentation can consume significant analyst time.

CarbonAI positions its platform as a way to support ongoing monitoring while leaving lending teams responsible for evaluating flagged issues and making consequential decisions.

Why Commercial Real Estate Lenders Are Looking at AI

Commercial real estate lending operates in a large and document-intensive market. The announcement cites a US commercial real estate market valued at approximately $20 trillion and estimates that lending teams spend around $50 billion annually underwriting new and existing loans.

The industry is also dealing with a substantial volume of maturing debt. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association figures cited in the announcement, approximately $875 billion in commercial mortgage balances were expected to mature in 2026.

As loans mature and refinancing decisions become necessary, lenders may need to reassess borrower finances, property performance, loan terms, and the potential risks associated with each exposure.

These demands can put pressure on teams that already spend considerable time collecting documents and updating financial analyses. Lenders must balance the speed of decision-making with the need for accurate underwriting and appropriate risk assessment.

CarbonAI aims to address this operational pressure by automating analytical tasks rather than asking lending professionals to guide a general-purpose AI tool through every step.

The company's approach focuses on specialised agents that understand the sequence of work involved in commercial real estate lending and can produce outputs linked to their supporting documentation.

Founders Bring Direct Commercial Real Estate Lending Experience

CarbonAI was founded by Jeff Saul and Josh Kaufman, who began their careers underwriting and managing commercial real estate loans at firms including Starwood Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Guggenheim.

Their experience in lending informed the development of the company's software.

Before CarbonAI, the founders built Nativ, a commercial real estate deal management platform. According to the announcement, Nativ worked with more than 30 lenders representing over $300 billion in assets under management.

Nativ was designed to fit into lenders' existing workflows, including their Excel models and reporting formats, rather than requiring them to replace those systems entirely. The business was subsequently sold to Built, where Saul and Kaufman held leadership roles.

This background shapes CarbonAI's focus on purpose-built lending workflows and integration with established working practices.

Instead of asking lenders to abandon familiar tools, the company aims to automate the analytical work that happens within and around those processes.

Early Commercial Traction and Customer Base

CarbonAI launched its first product suite in early 2025. The company reports that it achieved seven-figure contractual revenue within six months of that launch.

Its customer base includes debt funds, mortgage real estate investment trusts (mortgage REITs), agency multifamily lenders, and publicly traded financial institutions. The announcement describes some of these customers as among the largest firms in commercial real estate, although it does not name all of them.

The company has not disclosed its valuation, the number of customers using the platform, or the full financial terms of the funding round.

Its reported early revenue and customer adoption suggest that CarbonAI has begun commercialising its specialised AI tools. However, contractual revenue does not necessarily equal revenue already recognised or cash collected, and the announcement does not provide further detail on the metric.

The company's next challenge will be to expand adoption while maintaining reliability in workflows where incorrect financial information or missed risks can have material consequences.

Cowboy Ventures Leads the $12 Million Round

The $12 million funding round was led by Cowboy Ventures, with participation from Timber Grove Ventures, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures.

Caroline Duffy, a partner at Cowboy Ventures, said that established commercial real estate lenders were already customers when the firm first encountered CarbonAI.

According to Duffy, those lenders highlighted the limitations of generic AI tools in a complex business where data can be inconsistent and the margin for error is small. She also pointed to the founders' direct experience in commercial real estate lending as a factor behind the company's appeal.

The funding provides CarbonAI with additional capital to develop its platform and pursue growth in the commercial real estate lending market. The announcement does not disclose a detailed breakdown of how the proceeds will be used.

What Comes Next for CarbonAI?

CarbonAI is targeting a specialised segment of financial services where document-heavy analysis, established workflows, and ongoing risk monitoring create opportunities for automation.

Its platform is designed to reduce manual work across underwriting, due diligence, investment memo preparation, and post-closing surveillance. The company aims to give lending teams more time to focus on credit decisions, complex cases, and risk assessment.

The central test will be whether its agents can deliver consistent, verifiable outputs across different lenders, loan structures, and property types while maintaining the human oversight required for high-stakes financial decisions.

With $12 million in new funding, reported early customer traction, and founders who have worked directly in commercial real estate lending, CarbonAI is positioning itself to expand its role in the industry's adoption of specialised AI agents.