Guelane Mansour

Investment banker by trade, I am a skilled and dedicated professional with a passion for driving business growth and building successful ventures. Over 15 years in investment banking with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BoML), and HSBC in London, I honed my expertise in M&amp;A, financing, advisory, corporate finance, and real estate.In 2017, I transitioned to founding my own debt capital advisory company in London, advising real estate developers and investors on securing finance to build and acquire real estate assets in the UK and Europe. Our firm provided a hands-on approach from deal structuring, sourcing of the capital, negotiations with lenders, due diligence, up until the closing of the transaction.Recently, I launched pX, an AI-driven platform built to transform how institutional players, brokers, and developers access and evaluate opportunities in the UAE and Saudi real estate markets. At pX, we are creating decision-ready storylines from fragmented data — turning static information into actionable insights that empower capital allocation and development decisions across the region.Beyond my professional work, I am committed to giving back to my community and supporting the next generation of business leaders. I regularly mentor young entrepreneurs and provide strategic advice to emerging businesses.I welcome the opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals. If you're interested in learning more about my work or connecting with me, please feel free to reach out.

CEO and Co-Founder

London based property finance boutique providing funding solutions for real estate whether it is the acquisition of a property, the recapitalisation of a portfolio or property development.

Day 2 in Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦 
You think you understand a market until you sit with someone who has spent ten years in the trenches.

Yesterday, we met with Ahmed Bukhamseen, CEO & Co-founder of Quant, the Kingdom’s leading real estate intelligence platform. 

What started as a formal meeting turned into hours of candid discussion across the real estate ecosystem, focused on the constraints each stakeholder operates under.

That conversation went far beyond commentary. 
It was market intelligence. 
First-hand insight you can actually act on, shaping priorities, decisions, and what you choose to build next. 
This is not knowledge you gain sitting behind a desk or reading reports.

Grateful to Ahmed Bukhamseen for the openness and generosity with his time.

Nothing beats experience. 
No framework, no theory, 
no model comes close.

Watch the space 🚀
Hayssam Ibrahim

Guelane  Mansour

Investment banker by trade, I am a skilled and dedicated professional with a passion for driving business growth and building successful ventures.

After honing my skills in investment banking, I decided to apply my expertise to the real estate finance industry. Since founding my firm in 2017, I have successfully built a thriving business, providing innovative and effective solutions to many of my clients.

I am passionate about building a better finance ecosystem by leveraging technology, data-driven insights, and the community.  I believe that by creating a more transparent and collaborative ecosystem, we can deliver a fairer outcome for borrowers and lenders alike. 

In addition to my professional work, I am committed to giving back to my community and helping to support the next generation of business leaders. I regularly mentor young entrepreneurs and provide strategic advice to emerging businesses.  

I would welcome the opportunity to connect with like-minded people. If you're interested in learning more about my work or connecting with me, please feel free to reach out.

Co-Founder & CEO @ pX | Currently fund raising |

I’ll be in Riyadh this Wednesday and Thursday.

If you deploy capital into Saudi real estate, I’d like to buy you a coffee and ask a few uncomfortable questions.

Mainly around how decisions are really made.

Where the risk is obvious.
Where it’s underestimated.
And where data exists, 
but clarity doesn’t.

That gap is what we’re building around at pX.  

If you’re a fund, developer, lender, or close to capital allocation in KSA, happy to connect in person.

Hayssam Ibrahim

Back to Riyadh on the 2nd and 3rd of Feb.

Saudi is moving fast, with major announcements around foreign ownership, tokenisation, and evolving liquidity dynamics.

There’s also a lot of noise. 
Headlines, and social media takes that don’t always reflect reality on the ground.

For me, this trip is about going back to basics. 
Getting on the ground, spending time with operators, and hearing directly from the people building, financing, and executing. 
Filtering hype, understanding real challenges, and identifying where the opportunities genuinely are.

I’ve got a few meetings lined up with fund managers, developers, and lenders. 

If you’re in Riyadh and open to a coffee and an honest exchange of views, 
let’s connect. 

Hayssam Ibrahim

I help real estate teams turn data into decision-ready narratives.

Most people see me posting about AI, Dubai, and proptech.

What they don’t see is that I still run a side hustle.
Yes, I have bills to pay. 
And yes, food still needs to go on the table.

Real estate finance in the UK has always been part of my DNA. 
Even after moving from London to Dubai, I’m still deeply involved in live transactions. 
For example, I’m currently working on a few-million-pound industrial refinancing in Manchester across a couple of warehouse assets.

Distance and time zones don’t matter when the relationship with the client is built on trust.

Of course clients work with you because you know the market. 
That’s the entry ticket.
They stay with you because they trust your judgement. 
Because they know you’ll fight their corner. 
And because when underwriting starts and things get uncomfortable, you don’t disappear.

That’s where the real work is. 
Assessing risk properly. 
Structuring the right mitigants. 
Being clear on the strength of the asset and the sponsor, and honest about downside risk and the protections in place.

This is the part I enjoy the most: building that data-backed narrative that gets a deal over the line.

Because decisions are never made on raw data alone. 
They’re made through clear narratives, trade-offs, memos, and judgement. Moving from facts to something decision-ready.

That way of thinking is what pulled me into building what I’m building today.

Staying close to real transactions keeps me sharp. 
And grounded.

At what point do we stop pretending startups can be built without cash?

The moment you talk about funding, a certain type of advice shows up.

Be resourceful.
You don’t need cash.
Do partnerships.
Get people to work for equity.

It’s always said with confidence.
And almost always by people who’ve never built anything themselves.

This is how you spot the difference between those who’ve done it and those who talk about it.

People who’ve built understand one thing.
At certain stages of the journey, cash is not optional.

Here’s the practical reality.

Most development agencies don’t take equity. They take cash.
They have payroll, rent, pressure. Just like you.

Asking them to absorb execution risk today for a hypothetical outcome years later isn’t clever. It’s disconnected from reality.

And partnerships don’t replace capital.
They slow you down.

You get stuck in incentives, economics, legal, approvals, governance.
While your product waits.
While momentum dies.

Yes, you can hack an MVP.
Yes, you can be scrappy early on.

But once real users are waiting and delivery matters, cash is the only thing that moves the business forward.

Cash doesn’t guarantee success.
But without it, the business stalls.
Clients don’t wait. 
Teams fragment. 
Momentum dies.

Cash is king.
The rest is b*llshit.

I built a full, end to end, AI driven real estate investment platform in under two hours.

It cost less than ten dollars, using Lovable.

That experience fundamentally changed how I think about where SaaS is heading.

Lovable didn’t just make UI cheaper.
It made UI disposable.

Once intent is clear, interfaces can be generated, changed, and rebuilt in minutes. 
What used to require designers, front end, back end, weeks of coordination, and thousands of dollars is now close to frictionless.

That shifts where the real work sits.

If UI is disposable, the value is no longer in screens or polish.
It’s in understanding the user journey, the real pain points, and the exact moment where a decision is made. 
If you get that right, building the product becomes trivial.

The same shift is happening with AI.

High level analysis, building narratives, comparisons, PDFs, deal packaging. 
All of this is now cheap and accessible. On its own, that’s no longer a moat.

So the question becomes: where does real value sit now?

In my view, the answer is decision infrastructure.

In real estate, the equivalent of UI friction is decision assembly.
Mandates in CRM notes. 
Listings elsewhere. 
Market context in someone’s head. Analysis in Excel. 
Packaging in PDFs. 
Distribution via WhatsApp and email. 
All stitched together manually.

What pX is focused on is doing for decisions what Lovable did for UI.

Making decision assembly disposable.

For example, brokers should not think about:
• how to analyse a property
• how to compare areas
• how to package a deal
• how to explain it to a client

They should only think about intent:
• this is the mandate
• this is the property
• this is the client

Everything in between is handled by the system, embedded into existing workflows rather than replacing them.

UI is cheap.
Generic AI is cheap.

Judgement, trust, data quality, and workflow ownership are not.

That’s where the next layer of value in SaaS will be built.
Curious how others are thinking about this shift.

First day in Riyadh. Two meetings. One clear signal.

Yesterday in Riyadh, we met with a private credit fund and a logistics and industrial developer.

Different mandates. 
Same direction of travel.

Saudi is accelerating the institutionalisation of real estate.
You feel it in the room. 
The focus is underwriting discipline, transparency, and speed of decision making.

A few signals stood out.

1/ Residential mortgage backed securities are emerging, allowing banks to recycle capital and expand lending capacity.

2/ Private credit is taking on a larger role in development financing as traditional bank funding tightens.

3/ The Kingdom is opening its real estate market further to foreign investors, with direct ownership expected very soon. A clear before and after moment.

Together, these point in one direction. 
A more transparent, data-backed real estate ecosystem, spanning financing, transactions, and capital allocation.

But none of this works without a proper decision infrastructure.

There is strong demand for data, but not for more dashboards. 
What stakeholders need is decision ready intelligence that enables faster, higher-conviction decisions.

Final takeaway. 
The transformation is already underway. The velocity is real, and Saudi is a genuinely exciting market to be building in right now. 

Hayssam Ibrahim

Back in Riyadh next week, Tuesday and Wednesday.

I’ve decided to spend more time in Saudi, at least twice a month. 
Because this is where what we’re building fits how the market actually operates.

Saudi real estate already functions as an ecosystem. 
Lenders finance developers. 
Developers build. 
Brokers sell. 
Buyers purchase, often with financing. Cash flows through the entire chain.

The issue is not a lack of participants. 
It’s fragmentation.

Construction can be financed without clear visibility on exit. 
Demand can be assessed without funding being secured. 
Units can be sold without alignment on end-buyer credit availability.

Each decision makes sense in isolation, but the cash flows are interdependent. When one part breaks, the entire chain feels it.

Data is the entry point, but not the end product. 
What’s needed is a decision layer that connects insights, transactions, and financing, so capital, construction, sales, and exits are aligned.

This is why I’m spending more time on the ground in Saudi. 
The ecosystem already exists. 
It now needs to be connected.

I’ll be in Riyadh next week. 
If you’re involved anywhere across capital, development, lending, or sales, 
happy to meet and exchange notes.

Hayssam Ibrahim 
Ahmed Bukhamseen 
Fahad Bushager
Mario El Khoury

Hustling is an art.

People romanticise being resourceful. They don’t talk about what it actually means.
Asking talented people to work without cash.
Accepting deferred payments.
Convertible notes.
Full execution risk.
All on a startup that’s still being built.

Coming from banking, I never thought I’d be structuring such deals for my startup. Asking people to become creditors of a company without a balance sheet, liquidity, or a safety net.
Just a story, a revenue plan, and trust.

That’s not a transaction.
That’s a leap of faith.

I’m incredibly grateful to the tech team for taking that leap with me.
It puts real weight on my shoulders to deliver, and I don’t take that lightly.

We’re not building for the sake of ideation. This isn’t MVP theatre. 
We’re building to unlock revenues. 
GTM is clear. 
Distribution partners are lined up. 
Product is being deployed.

Still, it’s been a hard road. 
If the cash had been there, this would have been live months ago. 
Instead, it took time to find the right people and the right alignment.

But it clicked.

Now it’s execution mode.

Upwards and onwards.

Everyone wants to build in Dubai.
Very few are actually prepared for it.

Yesterday, a founder asked me what founders should know before building in Dubai.

Here’s the honest answer.

1. Runway comes first

Dubai is not a cheap city and there is no safety net.

It can be incredibly rewarding, but it is unforgiving if you run out of cash. 
Before committing, make sure you have a proper runway that gives you time to learn, adapt, and build relationships.

Early-stage funding in Dubai is largely non-existent.

In practice, early capital only shows up under very specific conditions.

Real traction. By traction, I mean revenue and visible month-on-month growth. 
You need to be beyond proof of concept. That is effectively pre-seed in this market.

A strong founder track record. 
If you are an exited or well-known founder, the conversation is very different.

Or relationships. A co-founder or close connections who have built before and are known in the ecosystem.

If you do not have traction, a track record, or relationships, raising here is almost impossible.

2. Come prepared

Dubai is a functioning ecosystem and a highly competitive market. 
The systems work, and the big players are already here. 

What works on a whiteboard does not always work on the ground. 
Regulation, legacy systems, and multiple stakeholders define what is actually possible.

Local experience matters. 
A co-founder or partner who has been in the trenches helps you see early what can be done, what cannot, and what will take far longer than expected.

Without that experience, you waste time, burn cash, and lose runway.

Coming prepared means reducing execution risk from day one.

3. Build, ship, and monetise fast

This links directly back to runway.

One of the only ways to extend runway is to generate revenue. 
Fast.

Build, ship, test, and monetise as early as possible. 
Revenue buys you time. 
Time buys you leverage.

If you are not making money, you will struggle to raise. 
Momentum fades and execution slows because cash is missing.

GTM matters. 
Monetisation matters.

If you do not find a path to revenue quickly, you are back to square one. 
No runway, no leverage, no funding.

Better to know early than learn the hard way later.

Founder to founder.

You can build the best tech in the world and still fail to monetise it.

Founders obsess over AI, workflows, speed, dashboards and automation.
In real estate, many look at developers still using tools that feel stuck in 2020 and call it inefficiency.

Let me explain. 

In Saudi Arabia, real estate developers are underwriting deals in Excel, WhatsApp and PDFs.
They are getting projects approved.
And they are not losing sleep over your product.

This became very clear to me during my recent trips to Saudi.

What I kept hearing from developers was not a demand for more data.
It was frustration with long sales cycles.

Units taking longer to sell.
Inventory sitting on the balance sheet.
Capital locked up longer than planned.

From a sales perspective, this is the uncomfortable truth.

Developers do not buy technology.
They buy certainty around cash flow.

Their workflows may look outdated to a technologist.
But they work well enough to move projects forward.
That is all that matters.

You think your platform is faster.
They think their spreadsheet is proven.

You think your AI removes friction.
They think changing tools introduces risk.

You think better data will change behaviour.
They think selling inventory will.

This is where most PropTech pitches fail.

You are not failing because your tech is weak.
You are failing because you are selling the wrong thing.

Data and intelligence are rarely the product.
They are the byproduct.

Great tech does not equal monetisation.
Better UX does not equal demand.
AI does not equal urgency.

Sales in real estate is about aligning with how developers actually make money.

If your product does not clearly help them sell faster, pay lenders and recycle capital,
it will struggle.

That is the difference between building tech
and building something developers will pay for.

One of the most useful things data can do for a startup isn’t just inform the product.
It can help determine where the product actually fits.

Over the last months, we’ve been looking closely at how real-estate projects are financed across the region and how those financing structures shape workflows.

That context matters more than surface-level demand.

In Dubai, the market is largely cash-led.
Cash buyers dominate.
Off-plan sales are central.

Pre-construction liquidity is mostly driven by off-plan sales, with capital coming directly from buyers.

In that environment, data primarily helps developers improve execution: pricing, timing, absorption, and launch strategy.

Saudi is structurally different.

In Saudi Arabia, pre-construction liquidity is driven by debt and structured capital, not off-plan sales.

At the same time, the scale of development has outgrown what government balance sheets, banks, or state-backed capital can underwrite on their own.

Banks are managing tighter balance sheets.
Government capital is becoming more selective.

That has created space for private credit, funds, and alternative capital providers to step in and provide liquidity to developers.

Those players are now taking on early-stage and long-dated exposure.
They are underwriting projects, developers, and cities.
They are holding risk over time.

That funding structure is inherently more data- and intelligence-dependent.

For private credit funds and institutional capital entering the Saudi real-estate market, the key questions shift away from sales velocity alone toward underwriting quality, developer credibility, liquidity planning, and exit visibility.

This is where pX fits naturally.

So this isn’t about a dramatic pivot.

It’s about understanding how capital is flowing and identifying which market participants need decision-grade intelligence the most.

Something I’ve noticed recently when pitching clients across the GCC. 

We often lead with the language of tech.
Efficiency. Automation. Speed.

But for many clients here, 
that’s not what actually moves the needle.

A lot of back and middle office work is already cost-effective through outsourcing.
Legacy processes may be clunky, 
but they work.
And replacing them comes 
with switching costs, 
training effort, and execution risk.

So the question clients are really asking is not
“Will this make us more efficient?”

It’s
“Will this make / save us money?”

Can this reduce financing costs?
Can it shorten the time it takes to sell units and enhance the top line?
Can it improve underwriting so capital is deployed at scale and unlock economies of scale? 

Revenue growth & cost savings show up directly on the bottom line.
Efficiency, on its own, often doesn’t.

That shift in mindset has changed how I think about pitching, building, and positioning.
Especially in markets where labour costs remain economically viable and capital discipline matters more than software elegance.

Curious if others building or selling in the region have noticed the same.

There’s a lot of AI being sold to real estate today.
Human-like answers. 
AI agents. 
“Game-changing” tools.

Here’s the uncomfortable question:

Are they actually better than the cheap tools already on the market?

I ran a real broker use case through Perplexity.
$17 a month.
LLM + search + citations.

The output was good.

You get a fast, coherent view of the situation.
You get a sensible area comparison.
You get some yield ranges.
You get a recommendation that broadly makes sense.

In other words, you get a first-pass answer.

Honestly, it reads like something a solid junior analyst would produce.

And that’s precisely the point.

Because a broker’s job doesn’t stop at the first pass.
That’s just the warm-up.

The real work starts when the client wants to understand more than just the headline numbers.

Where generic AI starts to fall short:
1/ It relies almost entirely on public, non task-specific data.
2/ The logic and assumptions behind the answers aren’t transparent or controllable.
3/ It produces high-level narratives, not something you can really stand behind.

That’s not a flaw.
It’s exactly what LLMs are designed to do.

But this is the bar you have to beat.

What we’re building at pX is different:
1/ Task-specific, authoritative real estate data.
2/ Clear visibility into assumptions and how conclusions are formed.
3/ Tools built for explaining and advising, not just summarising.

Dashboards show data.
LLMs produce a first pass.
Conviction comes from understanding what sits underneath.

Most AI real estate agents stop at search, summaries, and facts.

Under the hood, many rely on RAG (retrieval-augmented generation).
They pull the right data, summarise it, and turn it into text.

Useful.
But not intelligence.

Example.

An investor has AED 2M.
They want a two-bed, stable rental income, minimum 6% yield, and some upside.

A typical RAG system will say:
Here are the areas where two-beds trade around AED 2M.
Here are the rents.
Here are the yields.

All correct.
Still not a decision.

Real intelligence starts when the system explains what the numbers mean.

When it moves from facts to decision-ready storylines.
From “what” to the so what and why it matters to you.

Where high yields come with higher tenant turnover.
Where service charges quietly kill net returns.
Where new supply caps rental growth.
Where a deal only works below a certain price.

Same data.
Very different outcome.

In real estate, the value isn’t faster answers.
It’s knowing what matters and why.

At pX, we’re focused on the layer after RAG.
Owning the full decision-making assembly.
Turning data into decision-ready storylines.

Building our first embedded AI intelligence layer for real estate brokers has been one of the most clarifying experiences I’ve had as a founder.

Not because of the UI.
But because of everything behind it.

It’s easy to obsess over screens and features.
Then you realise UI is cheap.
Tools have made interfaces almost disposable.

The real work is elsewhere.

It’s in understanding the broker journey.
Knowing where decisions actually happen.
Spotting the moments where brokers pause, hesitate, or manually connect the dots.

For brokers, the problem isn’t lack of data.
The problem is fragmentation.

Data is static.
Tools are disconnected.
Client intent lives in the CRM.
Reality lives in stock and listings.
Truth lives in market data.

And brokers are left stitching all of that together every day.

What we’re building at pX is not another system brokers need to log into.
It’s an embedded AI intelligence layer that lives inside the tools they already use.

It doesn’t replace CRMs, ERPs, 
or market data platforms.
It connects them.

It shows up inside the workflow, at points of decision.
It adds context when context is missing.
It turns fragmented signals into decision-ready narratives.

The biggest shift for me has been this.
The moat isn’t data.
The moat isn’t dashboards.
The moat is owning the decision-making assembly.

We’re now working on a first pilot for brokers, to be deployed very soon with market participants.

This is just the beginning.

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