10 Questions with Matei Malos, Founder at Directimo

"This isn't your average chatbot. Our AI is a sophisticated contextual intelligence system trained on real transaction data, private market reports, and deep local insights."

Directimo has worked in the shadows for several years, slowly refining its model in multiple international markets before going live in sunny Spain. The business has seen a string of consecutive green lights ever since, and now they want to test its playbook, which the company says is easily scalable across borders; a statement backed by the fact that it wants to operate in 25 international territories in the next four years.

I spoke to founder Matei Malos (pictured below) and asked him ten questions. He gave me ten answers...

Who is Directimo for, and what can you tell us about their pain points?

Directimo is for international buyers of vacation homes in Europe. Their problems include a lack of transparency, outdated information, cumbersome offline processes, difficulties in finding a buyer agent (rather than a seller's agent) specialised in the client’s market segment with a guarantee of ethics, and managing the entire purchase process remotely.

What problem does Directimo solve?

Directimo digitises and streamlines vacation home transactions through an AI-powered marketplace. We offer verified data, automated matching between properties and buyers, and access to the best local buyer agents.

We reduce matching time by up to five times and eliminate unnecessary conversations and property visits.

What role does your AI Agent play for buyers, sellers, and agents?

This isn't your average chatbot. Our AI is a sophisticated contextual intelligence system trained on real transaction data, private market reports, and deep local insights.

For buyers, the AI guides buyers in understanding and discovering the real estate market in a new country, provides personalised property recommendations, nurtures them through the purchase journey and tailors communication based on their specific segment (retirees, investors, families, etc.). It also helps with awareness (introductory guides, market trends), consideration (property checklists, comparisons), decision-making (due diligence), and post-purchase support.

For agents, the AI handles lead pre-qualification and nurturing, allowing local agents to focus exclusively on near-closing transactions. This helps Directimo attract and retain the top 5% of buyer agents in each market.

For sellers, it generates property viewings with qualified buyers, reducing the sales time.

We are getting frequent feedback from people who have a high desire for verified properties with all the paperwork in order, and a need for personalised communication based on budget, preferences, and timeline. We have adapted the AI to collect these details from the first messages and automatically filter offers, while the supply team further validates the documents and rental licenses.

How do you ensure AI hallucinations don’t destroy traction and trust?

Directimo employs several strategies to prevent AI hallucinations from undermining user trust, compromising financial decisions, and jeopardising business traction. Firstly, our AI is trained with our exclusive knowledge base, which has been manually created and curated with a proprietary research methodology that cross-checks the information with at least three sources from top local agencies and service providers.

We use human-agent collaboration with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)—human buyer agents supervise the entire process to fine-tune the AI models.

Finally, we use a multi-agent system with specialised AI agents for different tasks (qualification, location clusters, pricing, profiling) working together under human supervision. Extensive experience in local real estate markets continuously informs and refines the AI systems. And we have a point-based reinforcement learning system that rewards successful actions and improves based on results.

How is the business funded? Will you raise soon?

We are currently raising a €2M Seed round, closing in June 2025, for accelerated expansion into other markets and developing scalable technology.

Validated in 2024, the business is growing rapidly (+88% GMV YoY). We can also share that we generated €13.6M GMV in 2024, €699K in gross revenue in 2024, while our Lifetime Value/Cost of Acquisition ratio is 10.

During its initial operational months, Directimo has already facilitated over €25 million in real estate transactions, demonstrating strong market validation. We are now focused on ambitious expansion plans, aiming to be active in 25 key property markets across Europe by 2029.

What problem keeps you awake at night, and how do you plan to solve it?

How do we maintain the quality of properties on the platform as we rapidly expand into more markets?

In vacation markets, data is fragmented, many listings are expired or incomplete, and without supply control, buyer trust erodes rapidly.

Solution: We approach each market hyper-locally with its specific characteristics, automate the extraction and validation of listings through AI, and deduplicate and filter in real-time properties without complete details or non-compliant information. Additionally, we recruit only top agents, motivating them with AI-qualified leads — real buyers, almost decision-ready. This ensures we always have quality properties and fast transactions, even with rapid expansion.

How many iterations did you need to get the right product/market fit? This isn’t a “new” business…

Directimo has leveraged 19 years of real estate market experience to develop its current product. The company has evolved from earlier ventures by the founders, who previously founded Homefinders.ro (buyer agent platform) and MagazinulDeCase.ro (which exited to the Finnish media group company Sanoma).

The current iteration of Directimo has been methodically developed and tested across 9 markets to create a replicable playbook. This involves multiple iterations and refinements of the business model before achieving the current product/market fit.

What is the biggest opportunity for AI agents? And what is the biggest threat?

Biggest opportunity: AI can manage end-to-end orchestration of a transaction in a fragmented and non-transparent market, from lead qualification, property matching, research, pricing benchmarks, due diligence checks, to post-sale follow-up. AI streamlines the real estate agent's activity, allowing them to focus on negotiation, closing, and local support, leading with empathy, intuition, and the human relationship in the transaction.

Biggest threat: AI hallucinations can undermine user trust, compromise financial decisions, and jeopardise business traction if not properly controlled. Directimo addresses this risk through human supervision and reinforcement learning at all critical points.

In essence, AI helps the human agents be more productive, work only with qualified clients, and focus on what AI cannot do well—closing transactions and managing local subtleties.

Tell us about your ambitious expansion plans (and how you plan to optimise them).

We plan to replicate this validated model in 25 markets over the next 4 years, with the next two new markets launching in Q4 2025.

We plan to scale supply and demand acquisition in parallel, with 40% of our upcoming fundraise going towards tech & AI. 25% in supply acquisition, a further 25% will go towards demand generation, and 10% to last-mile operations.

What is the industry not talking about, but should talk about more often?

The significant gap between digital transformation in other industries versus real estate, where 99% of vacation home transactions remain stuck in outdated processes from the 90s, despite the €70B market size.

The need for a buyer-centric approach, in an industry that has traditionally been seller and agent-focused, is obvious. The opportunity for specialised, market-by-market strategies rather than one-size-fits-all global approaches to vacation property marketplaces is huge.

Meanwhile, the potential for AI and data-driven approaches to transform the fragmented vacation property market, particularly through reinforcement learning and human-agent collaboration, is a major topic of conversation for the industry.

Finally, the critical importance of data quality and the risk that AI hallucinations can undermine user trust, compromise financial decisions, and jeopardise business traction. The industry is too focused on UX/UI and lead generation, but without accurate data, transparency, and AI control at critical points, residential transactions cannot become truly efficient.