Ten Questions With Ignacio Gorriti, Founder of Roomix

When we read that a 23-year-old real estate marketplace founder from Argentina had got funding from the likes of Adam D'Angelo (Director of OpenAI and founder of Quora), Guille Rauch (founder of Vercel) and Charlie Songhurst (Director of Meta), we knew we had to reach out.

Roomix is one of the new wave of challengers using AI not only to challenge large market incumbents' positions but also their underlying business models. We caught up with Roomix's founder, Ignacio Goritti (pictured below), to find out more...

What is the problem that Roomix solves?

Searching for a home is broken. You open five different portals, filter the same way five times, scroll past listings with fake or recycled photos, and start over the next morning. The portals make it worse, not better, because they rank listings by who pays the most, not by what actually fits you.

On the other side, realtors are juggling 5 to 10 disconnected tools across search, content, ads, pipeline, and transactions. Nobody has rebuilt that workflow end-to-end. Roomix aggregates everything into one place, ranks by relevance using AI, and gives agencies a single AI-native operating system that can be managed on the fly from WhatsApp instead of a pile of 2000s-era software.

History tells us that starting a new real estate marketplace is extremely hard. What made you want to build Roomix?

I enjoy hard challenges, and this is a rare moment where the incumbents physically can't respond. It's the Innovator's Dilemma playing out in real time. An old portal can't fix search without killing the pay-to-rank revenue that is its entire business. A CRM sits empty because realtors are never at a desk.

Some competitors treat real estate as one more listing channel, under 1% of GMV, so they'll never verticalize. I'm the only player building for both sides at once, with no portal revenue to protect and no legacy CRM to defend. When the whole industry is structurally stuck on infrastructure from the 2000s and AI just changed what's possible, that's worth the hard work.

What is the business model, and who are your customers?

B2C is free and ranks by relevance, listing quality, and realtor reputation. B2B is paid, but we never charge for placement, since we rank by reputation, not money. The analogy I use with realtors is Airbnb's Superhost: you earn your spot by being good, not by paying for it. On top of that, agencies get an AI executive assistant that automates content, manages clients, and generates reports, taking the most time-consuming and boring work off their plate so they can focus on what matters: talking to clients and giving them the best experience.

How does Roomix get its inventory?

We're a metasearch engine, not a portal. We automatically crawl every property portal and bring it all into one place. Now there are also some big real estate networks providing the data directly to us.

AI search needs great proprietary data. What data does Roomix have that will make the AI part worthwhile?

Two kinds. On supply, listings are reconciled across portals, every image analyzed, every POI mapped, plus signals we generate ourselves like luminosity, price-per-m² and more. That gives us a deep understanding of what actually makes a property valuable to a given user, not just what the listing says. On demand, 250K monthly visits and 7%-plus view-to-lead conversion show us what people click, save, and reject. That feedback loop makes the search better every month.

What’s the competitive landscape like in Argentina for a new portal? How do you plan to build an audience and scale the business?

The current leaders have been the same since 2005, and the biggest portal also owns the biggest CRM, so it's a tough setup to break into. But the incumbents are constrained in ways I'm not: I can iterate faster, stay closer to users, and operate with far less bureaucracy than a legacy portal. The clearest example is that we shipped a "filter by floor" the same day a user asked for it.

This is a long-term game. The goal is to be the first search experience young people use, the one they recommend to friends and come back to a year later because of how good the experience was. That's what we're building for: the first search experience for a generation already used to LLMs.

Which products or companies have you taken inspiration from when building Roomix?

Airbnb for the UX and the reputation-based ranking that proved you can grow a marketplace without selling placement. Zillow for showing what a real estate marketplace can become when it owns the data layer end to end. And StreetEasy too! 

You recently got some pretty impressive investors on board. How did that come about?

We closed a $500K round with Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Songhurst, Cocos Capital, follow-on from Picante Fund, Guillermo Rauch, and many more incredible operators.  Most of it came through warm intros and the time I spent in San Francisco getting feedback. What I love is seeing people who've shaped the world buy into the same vision: that AI opens a once-in-a-generation gap to rebuild both the infrastructure and the experience of real estate.

What’s on your to-do list for the next six months now that the investors are on board? 

Build the team, ship the mobile app (70%-plus of our traffic is already mobile), and push on new growth experiments to hit one million monthly visits.

What is one thing you think the real estate marketplace industry should be talking about more?

That ranking listings by who pays the most is quietly hostile to both home searchers and realtors, and AI now makes relevance-first ranking not just possible but expected. The related conversation nobody's having is that LLMs are becoming where discovery starts, and the portals built for the 2000s and pay-to-rank aren't ready for it. People's expectations are changing.