You Don't Need to Own the Whole Building

A deep dive into Prypco, General Catalyst's first proptech bet in the region

caption...

Something changed in Dubai’s real estate market when a villa worth AED 1.75 million sold out in under five minutes to 169 investors from 40 different countries. The average investment? Just over AED 10,000—roughly $2,800. This wasn’t a discount sale or a distressed property. It was the first tokenised real estate offering from Prypco, a two-year-old platform that’s quietly demonstrating what happens when you combine blockchain infrastructure, government backing, and a founder who actually understands how real estate works.

The recent pre-Series A funding led by General Catalyst—their first PropTech bet in the Middle East—validates something significant: fractional ownership isn’t a novelty feature for luxury markets. It’s becoming infrastructure. And while the funding amount remains undisclosed, the strategic signal matters more. General Catalyst backed Stripe, Airbnb, and Snap. They don’t invest in gimmicks.

What makes Prypco interesting isn’t just the technology or the regulatory partnerships—though both are considerable achievements. It’s that the platform has managed to facilitate nearly AED 10 billion in mortgages and attract over 50,000 users in roughly 24 months, while building something that works with the existing real estate ecosystem rather than trying to blow it up. That last part matters more than people realise.

We’re building the future of real estate, where property ownership is no longer limited by capital, geography, or bureaucracy.

- Amira Sajwani, Founder and CEO of Prypco

Why Dubai’s real estate market needed fixing

Dubai has a liquidity problem disguised as a luxury market. The city’s explosive growth—real estate transactions across the UAE surged from roughly $20 billion in 2020 to over $200 billion in 2024—created natural barriers that had nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with capital requirements. Minimum entry for freehold ownership typically meant hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront, which effectively locked out anyone who wasn’t already wealthy or didn’t have access to institutional backing.

The traditional platforms weren’t helping. They were agent-mediated, slow, and opaque. Poor listing quality, lengthy processing times, limited inventory access—all the friction points that make real estate transactions feel like archaeological expeditions. International investors, particularly the tech-savvy cohort flooding into Dubai over the past few years, wanted digital-first solutions. They got legacy processes with a mobile app bolted on.

But the deeper issue was structural. Existing fractional ownership models globally lacked regulatory clarity and government backing, which meant institutional investors couldn’t touch them even if they wanted to. You can’t build a legitimate asset class on uncertain legal foundations. And without institutional participation, you don’t get the liquidity or price discovery mechanisms that make secondary markets functional.

Dubai’s market was growing explosively, but access remained restricted to people who could write six-figure checks. That’s not a sustainable model for a city positioning itself as a global financial hub trying to attract diverse international talent and capital.

---

What Prypco actually built

Founded in 2022 by Amira Sajwani, Prypco isn’t a marketplace with fractional ownership bolted on. It’s a three-part platform that addresses different segments of the real estate investment stack:

1. Fractional ownership (Blocks)

2. Tokenized investments (Mint)

3. Mortgage services.

That integration matters because it means users don’t need to cobble together services from multiple providers—which is exactly how most real estate transactions fail.

The headline achievement is dropping the minimum investment to AED 2,000 (approximately $545) versus traditional six-figure requirements. But the infrastructure behind that number is what’s actually interesting. Properties are structured through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) for legal clarity, with each investor’s share properly documented. Not some vague “you own a piece” arrangement—actual legal ownership structures that hold up in court.

The mortgage piece integrates processing across 18 banks, offering 48-hour pre-approvals. Golden Visa support helps over 3,000 individuals navigate UAE residency requirements. And critically, the platform provides tools for 60,000+ real estate agents, giving them access to exclusive projects and additional revenue streams rather than trying to eliminate them from the equation entirely.

This last point deserves emphasis. Most PropTech platforms treat agents as friction to be eliminated. Prypco recognised that agents are distribution infrastructure, and built tools to make them more effective. That decision—to empower rather than displace—creates network effects that pure marketplace models can’t replicate.

The blockchain-based tokenisation uses the XRP Ledger for transparent, immutable ownership records. Smart contracts automate income distribution and ownership transfers. The technology isn’t the story here—the story is that the technology actually works in production, at scale, with government oversight.

Over 50,000 users in two years. AED 10 billion in mortgages facilitated. AED 20 million invested across 21 fractional properties, all fully funded. Those aren’t pilot program numbers. Those are proof-of-product-market-fit numbers.

---

The General Catalyst investment and what it signals

General Catalyst doesn’t make symbolic investments. Their portfolio includes some of the most successful platform companies of the past two decades. So when they lead a pre-Series A round for a Dubai-based PropTech company—their first in the region—it’s worth examining what they’re seeing.