In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers, Natalia Karayaneva, chief executive officer of Propy, joins theCUBE and NYSE Wired's Gemma Allen to discuss how AI and crypto rails are converging to automate the real estate transaction process. Karayaneva details Propy's $100 million credit facility powering an AI-led roll-up strategy, acquiring profitable title companies and transforming them with the company's smart-contract-driven platform. After 10X-ing its first acquired title company and achieving 20X revenue growth with doubled margins, Propy is accelerating its acquisition pace — including a newly announced Florida-based title company specializing in institutional work.
The conversation also explores Karayaneva's vision for a future where personal AI agents orchestrate every step of a home purchase — from mortgage to title — closing deals in a single day rather than 30 to 45 days. She explains why pure LLMs cannot solve the title industry alone, pointing to the years of proprietary data, county integrations and state licensing that form Propy's competitive moat. Karayaneva frames stablecoins and smart contracts not as a payments feature but as essential financial infrastructure for real estate, referencing how even recent market-moving research papers acknowledge a crypto layer underpinning the future of finance. With plans to grow from three acquired title companies to ten across markets like Texas, California and Tennessee, she provides a roadmap for building a magnetic acquisition strategy where legacy title company owners join forces with an AI-native platform poised for an eventual public listing.
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Natalia Karayaneva, Propy
Natalia Karayaneva of Propy joins theCUBE's Crypto Trailblazer series with NYSE Wired to discuss the company's ambitious $100 million expansion strategy. Propy aims to revolutionize the title industry through blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies.
In this enlightening session, Karayaneva outlines Propy’s progress since its inception in 2017, highlighting significant accomplishments such as the acquisition of its first title company and the implementation of AI and smart contracts to enhance efficiency. The episode underscores crucial moments and technological advancements driving Propy towards mass adoption in the title industry.
Karayaneva emphasizes the transformative potential of AI and blockchain in title and escrow processes, focusing on reducing fraud and enhancing cost-efficiency. The conversation also explores Propy's innovative solutions such as the AI Agent Avery, which optimizes document processing, and examines the impact of recent legislative changes on the real estate market.
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers, Natalia Karayaneva, chief executive officer of Propy, joins theCUBE and NYSE Wired's Gemma Allen to discuss how AI and crypto rails are converging to automate the real estate transaction process. Karayaneva details Propy's $100 million credit facility powering an AI-led roll-up strategy, acquiring profitable title companies and transforming them with the company's smart-contract-driven platform. After 10X-ing its first acquired title company and achieving 20X revenue growth with doubled margins...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What kinds of companies has the firm been acquiring, and what is its acquisition strategy to build out the platform's products and tools?add
Why do you believe the real estate industry is ripe for AI-driven disruption, and how do you plan to enter and win that market?add
What are the plans for the next 12 months regarding continued acquisitions of title companies, expansion into new states or locations, and the PropTech strategy (including integrations and working with founder-owners)?add
>> Welcome back to TheCUBE studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. This is Crypto Trailblazers, part of our program with NYSE Wired, and joining me now is the CEO of Propy, Natalia Karayaneva. Welcome, Natalia.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Thank you so much for having me back.
Gemma Allen
>> So you have been busy since you were last here on the show with us a couple of months ago. Had a couple of acquisitions, building out the platform and the operating system for real estate broadly. Talk me through what's been going on.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Absolutely. Well, first of all, it's very nice to be back since October last year. And also, thank you so much for recognizing Propy and our new race here on the floor. It was an incredible experience to see Propy on New York Stock Exchange on the screens. So the biggest thing that we've done is we raised a hundred-million-dollar credit facility for an AI-led roll-up strategy.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow. Okay. And as part of that, you have been acquiring companies to help build out the product and tool set on the platform. Can you give us a sense of what it is that you've been scouting for and acquiring in?
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Well, let me get back a little bit with the story. Our mission is to automate the real estate transaction process. We want the new generation to buy homes with just a couple of clicks' experience. So there is no bureaucracy. And we aim to increase the liquidity of real estate and see the future of the market with 20 millions of homes sold annually, not five to seven million homes sold annually. So the goal now is to acquire profitable existing title companies in certain markets that we're interested in, then we apply our AI platform that is driven by smart contracts. We bought our first title company three years ago. That was an incredible experience. We 10X'd this company-
Gemma Allen
>> Wow....
Natalia Karayaneva
>> within a couple of years. And last year, we looked at our numbers with 20X the revenue, double the margin, and we decided to acquire more of those. So we bought another one in October. It's been doing really great. And today, we're actually announcing the news that we've acquired a title company in Florida, one of the leaders in institutional title work. There are two closing attorneys that we're bringing on board, and we will be serving one of the largest REITs in America and a number of wholesale investors. So it's been an incredible journey since we last met.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow. Well, you've certainly been busy, Natalia, that's for sure. It seems as though from an outside perspective, these industries, real estate in particular, it was ripe for change and disruption. When you think about it, you wonder, wow, how has, in some respects, some of this not happened faster or sooner from the perspective of it's a lot of repeatability, a lot of administrative overhead. What are your thoughts on how, I guess, AI has fundamentally shifted the game, the opportunity for you and the team and Propy, but also the industry broadly?
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Yeah, you are right. Well, first of all, the real estate industry is ripe for disruption right now because it's been an outed industry. It's a very rule-based way of closing deals. It's almost like a paralegal, but yet for some reason, it's all driven by human work. It's mostly people doing a lot of calls and emails, so it's a perfect industry to apply the AI technology and smart contracts to automate the workflow. And we've seen that happening. That's happening in the legal space. So you know those successful companies, Eugia, Harvey. In the UK, it's LawAdvisor by Brennan Ong. And we are witnessing the transformational change of the legal system by AI. So now, a similar thing is happening in real estate. And in order to own this operational layer, not only software, but the operational layer, the best way to get into the market is to acquire existing companies. It's a faster distribution. It's a faster adoption flywheel. And the mode really is to get the licenses, the proprietary data that we're having, the maturity of the platform. We combine this all together and we're really willing to win in the market where the legacy participants are still afraid of AI. And even if they try to automate, they probably won't be as fast as AI native founders like us.
Gemma Allen
>> So a lot of exciting things happening. AI is enabling a lot of opportunity and streamlining a lot of clogs in the process. Talk us through what a future transaction would look like from offer to close using Propy and also, I guess, including these new areas for acquisition and integration that you've brought in.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> When we imagine the future, AI-driven future, a lot of industries, such as style, will be really multi-agent orchestration platforms. So when it comes to the future of the consumer, just like today, we all have iPhones. You imagine that everyone will have a personal AI agent. So when you pick a home, you go there, you feel the smell of the home, you feel the texture of the property, the vibe of the neighborhood, but once you make the decision, your personal AI agent will pick an AI-enabled mortgage, an AI-enabled title company, then they will communicate between each other via text, email, APIs, and they will close a deal. It will happen within a day, not 30, 45 days.
Gemma Allen
>> Oh, wow.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> And think about it. Who will this personal AI agent choose? Of course, first of all, they will choose an AI native title or mortgage company. They will choose a company that is using crypto as rails, stablecoins, smart contracts. Even today, if you ask any LLM, they will tell you who is the future of title or who is the future of mortgage using AI and blockchain. So it will be a fascinating future, a bright future for home buyers, where the transactions will be faster, more liquid, and just easier.
Gemma Allen
>> And Natalia, the decision to buy versus build, specifically in the AI world and even in the world of crypto and blockchain broadly, there is a lot of fast, accelerated feature sets and products happening. It feels like releases are happening on an almost daily basis. If you think about products like Harvey, which are making great headway, deciding whether or not you yourself build on top of those platforms or license those platforms for your integrated feature set versus actually build anything proprietary yourself, in a race that feels like it's very speed-driven, how do you think about that? How do you weigh that decision up?
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Are you asking about organic growth versus acquisition or using ready tools or building proprietary type?
Gemma Allen
>> Using ready-made like ChatGPT, Claude, legal, all of these tools, cloud, code, versus, especially for specific niche spaces like law, like legal, like Harvey, versus where you will then have a longer-term dependability on those products, and they're expensive and you lose somewhat of the control, but the speed is there, versus building yourself. How do you think about that?
Natalia Karayaneva
>> That's a great question. First of all, we're very LLM-agnostic. We're always transitioning to new tools and LLMs according to their maturity. But the most important part is that some industries, such as style, it's impossible to solve by LLM, pure LLM, because you need proprietary data. You need context protocol for those agents to operate within, and this is delivered by multiple integrations with industry participants, lenders, counties, tax information. We've spent years and years to integrate all those tools, and I think it's relatable to other industries as well. And then licenses. We're licensed in every state. And we're using this proprietary document body that we have processed to train our AI. So each segment of our AI agents, whether it's a voice agents, whether it's review and analyze agents, they have to know the context, not only the law, but also all the workflows of our escrow officers. And it's fascinating to finally see everything coming together after eight years of integrations building and the team getting along between the closers and the dev team. So I can see many industries growing through building this proprietary AI technology versus just relying on LLM to one day disrupt an industry. And it's also, our title industry is something between paralegal and a banking solution because title is a very rule-based industry where escrow officers are licensed, almost like legal, but the transactions are deterministic. It's also we're touching the banks with escrow funds. We have liability for escrow and we're required to get through the licensing process, and that's where it's fascinating to merge those two cutting-edge technologies, AI and the crypto rails, the blockchain innovation together, because we're just using the best of the best for the new financial world. We know it's moving on crypto rails. It's happening. Stablecoins will be the norm for moving money, and then we're mirroring the advancement of AI for this paralegal work.
Gemma Allen
>> So your view is that cryptocurrency, it's not a feature. It's not a payments feature. It's essentially core infrastructure for the future of real estate.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Yes. Absolutely. The crypto rails is an essential financial infrastructure and the foundation of the future of finance world. I don't know if you've seen this Citrini paper on AI.
Gemma Allen
>> I did. Who didn't? The Substack paper, right?
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Yes.
Gemma Allen
>> It did move the markets quite literally.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Exactly. It moved the market. Obviously, it's very pessimistic picture of the future, but even though the paper was about AI and the disruption of AI and disruption of the real estate industry, I recommend to all the real estate agents and all PropTech founders to look at this paper as well. So even though the paperwork is primarily about AI, I don't know if you've noticed, but there is a crypto layer there-
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah, for sure....
Natalia Karayaneva
>> that the financial world will move via stablecoins because of the speed. It's speed and reliability of the money moving through the new rails. And also, smart contracts, they provide security for those complex workflows, such as title or real estate.
Gemma Allen
>> So Natalia, what's ahead now for the next 12 months from here? Are you going to continue on the acquisition hunt? Are you also focusing on new states, new locations? From a PropTech perspective, broadly, I know state-by-state things tend to vary quite a bit, right?
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> How are you thinking about things?
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Yeah, absolutely. The next 12 months will be fascinating. We've acquired already three title companies, once again, one about three years ago. And now, it's about acquiring the next seven. So we'll have 10 founding title company owners building it all together, hopefully going public here on this floor. And the number one priority is really integrations. The best acquisitions are not hostile. They are magnetic.
Gemma Allen
>> I love that.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> So we're looking for founders that are excited about the future change of the industry. They want to unite the forces. We're looking at the best markets, such as Texas, California, Tennessee, and we're seeing an incredible pool of those title company owners that are reaching out to us or we're reaching out to them. Some of them are very afraid of AI, but when they join us, we teach them, educate them, and they become part of the story.
Gemma Allen
>> I love it. Well, Natalia, in a couple of times I have met you, I must say you also have a magnetic energy yourself, so I have no doubt that these opportunities will find you and you'll find them.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Thank you so much, Gemma.
Gemma Allen
>> Thanks so much for coming on TheCUBE.
Natalia Karayaneva
>> Thank you.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen coming to you from TheCUBE studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. This is Crypto Trailblazers, part of our NYSE Wired programming. Thanks so much for watching.
Gemma Allen