In 2018, Guilherme Farinha, Mário Gamas, João Januário and Gonçalo Abreu decided to launch Alfredo AI. They had just finished their courses and they were looking for a house. They often asked themselves if the most suitable apartments fulfilled their requirements and had a fair price. “We did a search and we concluded that there was not a single tool we could use to help us answer this question. As we have a statistical background, we started to build an algorithm that we used to answer this question”, recalls Gonçalo Abreu, CEO of Alfredo AI.
Once the product was designed, it was tested in potential customers and the feedback could not have been better. “When we showed our project to real estate professionals, we realized that it had strong potential. We got our first client and the project started at full speed”, recalls Gonçalo Abreu.
“The real estate market needs innovation. The new generations are increasingly demanding, namely concerning the access to information, which is largely due to the new technologies”, explains Gonçalo Abreu. The Técnico alumni felt “the need to create a startup that reflected what we learnt at Técnico, a safe working environment where people can share their ideas and knowledge”, stresses Gonçalo Abreu.
Alfredo generates market reports for any residential property in Portugal through the use of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data.
About 2000 real estate agents are already using Alfredo. The startup recently closed a partnership with Novo Banco. “One of our main goals was to work with the banking sector and housing credit”, says Gonçalo Abreu. “The partnership with Novo Banco was a vote of confidence”.
“Our technology is already being used in the financial sector. One of Alfredo’s strongest components is the way our pipeline cleans and extracts intelligence from the data, which ends up being a way to describe geographical behaviours ”.
“We find Machine Learning algorithms developed at Técnico almost everywhere”, says the CEO of Alfredo AI. “There are companies that have a close link with Técnico, namely Unbabel. We would like to see that happen with Alfredo”, said the alumnus.
The alumni have several ongoing projects. “We want to get closer to national institutions in order to improve the information on real estate market; we would like to raise our first round of funding; we want to expand our business abroad and produce scientific research”, says Gonçalo Abreu. “We aim to be the AI startup that makes the global real estate data accessible”.
