Private Beta · Chicagoland · 2026

Built by a broker.
For brokers.

Zourse is the AI workspace that underwrites deals, reviews contracts, and sources opportunities — in seconds instead of hours. Built by a Chicago managing broker and a former JPMorgan AI research lead. Starting with Chicagoland.

Request early access See the product
Founded by
Broker +
AI researcher
Married co-founders
Market
Chicago
first
MRED · 46K members
Customer #1
Block 22
Realty
$30M+ closed · since 2020
Status
Shipped,
live
Now recruiting partners
Underwriting✦ Contract intelligence✦ Deal sourcing✦ Portfolio strategy✦ Transaction coordination✦ Compliance & risk✦ Underwriting✦ Contract intelligence✦ Deal sourcing✦ Portfolio strategy✦ Transaction coordination✦ Compliance & risk✦
01
Who built this

A Chicago broker and a former
JPMorgan AI research lead.

Zourse was founded by Femi and Toyin Aguda — married co-founders building the tool they wished existed. Femi lives the problem every day at his brokerage. Toyin published the research that makes the technical answer possible.

FA

Femi Aguda

Co-founder & CEO · linkedin.com/in/femiaguda
Licensed IL Broker · 2017 IL Managing Broker · 2020 MRED Chicagoland $30M+ closed

Femi grew up in Block 22, Apartment 3 in Lagos, Nigeria. The address became the name of his brokerage. He's been licensed in Illinois since 2017, became a managing broker in 2020, and founded Block 22 Realty the same year. He's closed $30M+ in residential, small multifamily, and fix-and-flip transactions across Chicagoland.

"I'm not speculating about this problem — I live it every week. Every manual spreadsheet, every rushed contract review, every missed opportunity. Zourse exists because I needed it to exist."

TA

Toyin Aguda

Co-founder & CTO · linkedin.com/in/toyinaguda
Ex-JPMorgan · VP AI Research Lead Booth MBA · 2025 Patent pending · NLP ACL lead author

Toyin was most recently Vice President, AI Research Lead at JPMorgan Chase, where she built production LLM systems for financial data extraction. Before that, she was a data scientist at Caterpillar and Nielsen. She holds an MBA from Chicago Booth (2025), an MS in Applied Probability & Statistics, and an MA in Applied Economics. She has a patent pending on automated NLP message generation and is lead author on a published ACL paper — "Large Language Models as Financial Data Annotators: A Study on Effectiveness and Efficiency" — the exact technical problem Zourse solves, applied to the financial domain.

"Real estate is a structured-data problem wearing a relationship-business mask. The AI capability has arrived. Femi is the domain expert. I'm the researcher. We're building this together."

Spouse co-founders have the lowest failure rate of any co-founder configuration. Canva, Cisco, VMware, Eventbrite, Strava, and Patagonia were all started by married couples.

02
The premise

Real estate runs on judgment, paperwork, and relationships. Two of those should be automated.

At Block 22, Femi spends 15+ hours a week on tasks that have nothing to do with closing deals: parsing PDFs, rebuilding spreadsheet models, checking comps, drafting addenda, chasing signatures. That's the pain every broker, investor, and developer knows.

Zourse handles the mechanical work — the underwriting, the drafting, the document review, the lead ranking — so professionals spend their time where judgment and relationships actually matter.

03
A working demonstration

Watch Zourse underwrite a Chicago deal in real time.

A 24-unit multifamily at 4850 N Clark — Uptown Chicago. $4.2M ask. This is actual product output.

app.zourse.ai / workspace / underwriting
· Recorded from the production backend.
04
Seven capabilities, one workspace

The full lifecycle of a deal — from first lead to final disposition.

Starting with underwriting for Chicagoland investors. Expanding across capabilities and markets as we grow.

i.

Underwriting WEDGE

Cap rate, IRR, DSCR, ARV, cash-on-cash. Full pro formas, sensitivity tables, stress tests — instantly, against live MRED comps and rent data.

ii.

Contract intelligence

Draft purchase agreements, leases, addenda. Review for missing clauses, non-standard terms, IL-specific compliance.

iii.

Deal sourcing

Distressed assets, motivated sellers, pre-foreclosure, probate, code violations. Cook County public records, ranked.

iv.

Compliance & risk

Illinois fair housing, disclosure requirements, and brokerage workflows that reduce liability.

v.

Transaction coordination

Autonomous workflow across agents, lenders, attorneys, inspectors, and title. Deadlines tracked, reminders sent.

vi.

Portfolio & asset management

Track NOI, surface below-market rents, model disposition, forecast appreciation — across your whole book.

vii.

AI copilot — always on

Draft listing descriptions. Respond to clients. Strategize negotiations. Pull market insights. The assistant that knows every deal in your pipeline.

05
Two invitations

We're looking for conviction capital and Chicago design partners.

For investors

Back the AI layer for a $3.7T industry.

Real estate is the largest asset class in the world and the least digitized. Zourse is Harvey for real estate — a vertical AI OS built by a domain-expert broker and a published AI researcher. We're raising a $2.5M pre-seed.

  • Working product · Block 22 Realty is Customer #1
  • MRED data moat from day one
  • Domain-expert CEO + ex-JPMorgan VP AI CTO
Request the deck
For Chicago brokerages & funds

Shape the product. Keep the advantage.

We're selecting 4 Chicagoland brokerages, funds, and developers to join as founding design partners. Free for the first year. Founding-member pricing locked through 2028.

  • Weekly sessions with Femi & Toyin
  • Custom integrations with your existing stack
  • Locked pricing through 2028 — 50% off standard
Apply as partner
Request access

Join the waitlist.

Tell us who you are and how you'd use Zourse. Chicagoland brokerages and funds get priority for the design partner program.

By requesting access you agree to be contacted about Zourse. We don't share your information. Ever.

06
Questions, answered

Details, for the curious.

Who's building this?
Femi Aguda, a licensed Illinois managing broker since 2020 and owner of Block 22 Realty, and his wife Toyin Aguda, former VP of AI Research at JPMorgan Chase and lead author on a published ACL paper about using LLMs for financial data annotation. Both are committed full-time on close of funding.
Why start with Chicago?
Three reasons. One, Femi is a licensed managing broker in Illinois — we're building for a market we live in. Two, as a member of MRED Chicagoland (one of the top 3 MLS feeds in the country with 46,000 members), we have data access on day one that competitors would need 3-6 months of RETS licensing to match. Three, Cook County has the deepest public records in the Midwest — distressed, probate, tax delinquency — which powers our deal sourcing. Own Chicago, then expand to other Midwest metros, then nationwide.
Is Zourse built yet, or just an idea?
Built. The backend is shipped, tested, and running. The deterministic underwriting engine (cap rate, IRR, DSCR, 5-year DCF), the LLM orchestration layer, the rule-based risk analyzer, the FastAPI production backend, the chat interface with source citations — all working today. Block 22 Realty is Customer #1 and uses it on real deals. We're raising to hire engineers and scale to 10+ paying customers in 15 months.
How is this different from ChatGPT or Claude directly?
Generic models hallucinate on real estate specifics and have no access to live MLS, ATTOM, or county records. Zourse is grounded in real-time data, outputs structured and cited results, and never lets the LLM compute financial numbers directly — the underwriting math is deterministic Python code, verified against ground truth. The LLM synthesizes a narrative; it cannot invent a cap rate.
What about data security and compliance?
SOC 2 Type I prep is underway. Row-level tenant isolation on every database query. PII redaction before any LLM call. Full audit logs on every output. Illinois fair housing and disclosure compliance baked into the workflow engine. Toyin's JPMorgan background means we approach compliance from a financial-services mindset, not a typical startup mindset.
Does Zourse replace brokers?
No. Zourse removes mechanical work — modeling, drafting, reviewing — so professionals spend their time on judgment, relationships, and closing. Femi built it for his own brokerage first. The best brokers using Zourse close more deals, not fewer.
When will I get access?
Private beta is active with Block 22 Realty. We're selecting 4 additional Chicagoland design partners in Q2 2026. Broader access begins Q4 2026, with general availability in early 2027. Design partners get access immediately and founding-member pricing locked through 2028.