A startup founded by graduates is using AI to support real estate investors, designed and launched with support from collaborations at 91ÑÇÉ«.
is an AI platform built for real estate and asset management co-founded by Gaurav Madani and Arunabh Dastidar, who met as Schulich MBA students in 2017 and graduated together in 2019. The tool’s third co-founder, Zain Nathoo, is also a Schulich alum.
The platform was created to solve fragmented data challenges in real estate investing by using AI to organize information and provide customizable systems that help investment teams analyze data, automate tasks and make faster decisions. These were challenges both Dastidar and Nathoo encountered while working in real estate investment and helping to manage more than $1 billion in property assets.
Frustrated by delays in financial reports – which often arrived in spreadsheets weeks late and slowed decision-making – they turn to Schulich for guidance and support to bring their solution to market.
Early on, the founders brought their idea to Chris Carder, executive director of Schulich's Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Madani recalls approaching Carder, who at the time was alone in the Schulich cafeteria, and sharing the team’s idea. Carder offered the team direction, facilitated important connections and amplified the company within his own network.
"He was a sounding board, which is what founders need in the early days," Madani says. "Especially in the early days when no one knows you, those kinds of things are really important."
Beyond Carder, the company drew on other forms of support at Schulich. Andre Kuzmicki, retired professor, introduced the team to senior professionals at large Canadian institutions who would become some of Leni's first clients.
As well, Schulich's Entrepreneurial Studies program has partnered with Leni to create student internships.
"Schulich gave us a community of people who believed in what we were building and opened doors that would have been much harder to access on our own," says Dastidar. "That early support was instrumental in helping us gain traction and credibility as we scaled."
While Leni began by connecting industry systems to track performance in real time, it evolved to integrate AI, which became central to its development from 2022 onward.
Today, it helps investment teams evaluate deals, conduct research and automate reporting tasks that would otherwise take days.
Madani says Leni stands out for its focus on accuracy. It is trained to break complex questions into parts, route them across multiple AI models, evaluate whether the responses meet its threshold, and surfaces an answer only when it passes – along with the reasoning and source data behind it.
"Leni will always treat any output as a hypothesis that needs to be proven," he says.
As the company expands, the relationship with Schulich continues in both directions. Leni's founders now serve as mentors, judges and guest lecturers with Schulich Startups, where they contribute to the same ecosystem that helped them get started.
For students who are thinking about building their own tool, Madani's advice is simple: "No two entrepreneurial journeys look the same," he says, adding that Schulich’s support was instrumental to Leni’s success.
With files from Mzwandile Poncana