Matchstick Ventures Fund IV is excited to announce an investment in Locate.ai, a vertical AI brokerage transforming the commercial real estate leasing process. With over one million brick-and-mortar businesses in the U.S., physical site selection remains one of the most critical, and outdated, processes these businesses face. Traditional leasing is slow, expensive, and heavily reliant on human labor, resulting in costly mistakes. As large language models (LLMs) reach maturity, there's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to automate and modernize the commercial site selection process.

Locate.ai leverages proprietary AI models trained on industry-specific data to automate up to 90% of the commercial leasing workflow. From identifying optimal store locations to managing negotiations, Locate enables national brands to move faster and with greater precision, unlocking higher profitability. The company's unique access to training data, gathered through years of direct leasing execution, makes its models more accurate and valuable over time. Locate charges a recurring success fee per location, and has already demonstrated strong traction with $5.7M in revenue and recognition as the top-rated solution in the space.

The founding team brings deep technical and domain expertise. CEO Joe Lee and CPO Peter Hu met as Stanford undergrads and have since assembled a senior team with experience spanning real estate operations, AI engineering, and enterprise SaaS. Together, they’ve obsessed over the intersection of artificial intelligence and leasing longer than anyone else in the market. With support from experienced advisors and investors including Zillow board members and executives from Starbucks and J.Crew, Locate.ai is uniquely positioned to redefine how national chains expand in the physical world.

Why we’re excited about Locate.AI

Commercial real estate is a massive industry; JLL alone generated $23.4B in revenue and $1.1B in adjusted EBITDA in 2024. Despite its scale, the industry remains relationship-driven and historically resistant to software adoption. We don’t believe AI will replace human relationships in complex leasing and sales, nor do we see “selling software to brokerage” as the path to disruption. Instead, we believe the winning approach is to launch a competing offering, empowering a new company with data and tools to make exceptional brokers faster, more accurate, and more effective.

Locate.AI is structured like a traditional brokerage, but with two critical advantages:

1. Precision site selection: By overlaying a client’s sales history with demographic data, Locate.AI pinpoints the exact location that maximizes revenue. This capability has driven revenue lifts of 10%+ for customers—a game-changing outcome in retail expansion.
   
   
2. Agentic AI productivity: Their platform slashes broker admin work from ~120 hours to ~20 (e.g., drafting LOIs), freeing up capacity to win more clients and deliver better service.

You can see the results of these advantages in their numbers; Locate.AI is already near cash-flow break-even and projects $10M+ in 2025 revenue. With a massive market, differentiated technology, strong traction, and a world-class team, we see this as a highly compelling investment opportunity.

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