Radius.

The brokerage that hired six AIs.

It is 9:47 on a Tuesday morning in San Francisco's Battery Street, and a real estate agent in Texas is closing a house she has never seen, with paperwork she did not draft, on a contract that has already been compliance-checked. The brokerage doing all of this for her is Radius. The supervisor is an AI named Mel.

Radius - legally Agentdesks Incorporated, a fact almost no one outside Crunchbase knows - is the kind of company that wins awards in categories most people did not know existed. The "Best Use of AI by a Brokerage." The "Best of Proptech, Entrepreneur." Two consecutive years for the latter, as Inman would happily remind you. The trophies are real. The category is real. The question is whether the rest of the industry has noticed yet.

You can find Radius licensed and selling real estate in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and New York. You will not find it on a billboard. It does not run Super Bowl ads. It signs up agents one by one, asks them to bring their own brand, and then quietly hands them an AI back office.

The problem they saw.

Real estate, viewed honestly, is two jobs glued together. The first is talking to humans about houses. The second is paperwork - contracts, disclosures, compliance forms, e-signatures, MLS entries, CRM hygiene, marketing collateral, lead nurture, transaction coordination, broker reviews, audit trails. The first job is why people become agents. The second job is why they quit.

Most agents in America split commissions with a big-name brokerage because the big-name brokerage handles the second job. The trade is brutal: in exchange for not doing paperwork, the agent gives up 30 to 50 percent of every check, their independence, and any chance of building a brand that survives leaving the franchise.

Radius noticed this and, with the casual confidence of people who have never been told no, decided to do something about it.

The founders' bet.

In 2015, Biju Ashokan and Sanya Gurnani started a company called Agentdesks. Their first instinct was modest: build a private social network for licensed real estate agents, a sort of LinkedIn that did not also try to sell them MBA certificates. By 2018, the network had 25,000 agents and a $4 million Series A from Sierra Ventures and Crosscut.

If they had stopped there, Radius would be a footnote. They did not stop. In 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic that mostly killed B2B real estate startups, the company got a Colorado brokerage license. The pivot was not subtle. They were no longer building a tool for agents. They were becoming the brokerage agents work under.

The bet was specific: if you could build a brokerage that ran on software, an agent could keep more of their commission, keep their own brand, and still not have to think about compliance. The platform would do the second job. The human would do the first. Everyone wins, except possibly the franchises.

This is the part where most pitch decks would say "the rest is history." The rest, in this case, was five more years of grinding. Colorado in 2020. California in 2021. A $200 million transaction year. A $500 million transaction year. Series B in November 2023 - $13 million, backed by Pete Flint of Trulia, Spencer Rascoff of Zillow, Gokul Rajaram, and Cota Capital. By 2024, they were doing $1.1 billion in property sales across eight states.

The product, finally.

Radius's product is not one product. It is, depending on how you count, either a brokerage with software glued to it or a piece of software with a brokerage license stapled to the back. The company would prefer the second framing.

At the center sits Mel - an AI supervisor that the team will not formally define, perhaps because defining things gives competitors ideas. Mel watches the deal flow. Mel routes the leads. Mel knows when a contract is missing an initial on page seven. Underneath Mel are six specialist AI agents, each named only by their function:

The Nurture Agent

Handles lead follow-up. The boring, daily, "did the homeowner respond" cadence that humans inevitably let slip.

The CRM Agent

Keeps the contact record current. Logs the call. Writes the note. Tags the lead. Forgets nothing.

The Marketing Agent

Generates branded collateral. Property descriptions. Social posts. Mailers. All in the agent's brand, not the platform's.

The Documentation Agent

Drafts and fills contracts. Disclosures. Addendums. The kind of paperwork that gets people sued when it goes wrong.

The Support Agent

Talks to clients when the human cannot. Sends updates. Schedules walkthroughs. Politely.

The Auditing + Closing Agent

Reviews the file before closing. Flags compliance gaps. The last set of eyes before the wire goes out.

The platform also ships a branded mobile app, MLS integrations across all eight licensed states, an 80+ integration stack (Stripe, Twilio, HubSpot, Intercom, Slack, the usual suspects), and a transaction dashboard called Radius Office - which is the specific product that won Inman's "Best Use of AI by a Brokerage" award in 2024. The judges presumably had a lot to read.

The proof.

Numbers are the polite way of arguing. Here are the ones Radius will let you cite.

Radius supports 175+ teams. Has a network with roughly 85,000 agents in some form of engagement. Closed more than 5,000 deals. Cumulative property sales north of $3 billion. Annual revenue, per Latka in 2024, was around $3.1 million - which sounds modest until you remember that this is a brokerage and brokerages report commission revenue, not GMV.

For investors, the backer list does most of the talking. Pete Flint founded Trulia. Spencer Rascoff co-founded Zillow. The two largest American real estate portals of the last twenty years were each started by men who put their personal capital into Radius. That is either an enormous endorsement or an enormous coincidence. It is probably not the second.

The mission.

Radius's stated mission is to "provide real estate entrepreneurs with modern tools and exceptional support." That sentence does roughly half the work it should. The actual mission is harder to phrase politely.

The actual mission is to make the big-name franchise model obsolete. To prove that a brokerage built on AI can hand an independent agent better software, better compliance, better margins, and a brand the agent owns, instead of one they rent. To turn agents into broker-owners.

This is a slow-moving heresy. Most agents have never run a P&L. Most brokerages have spent thirty years convincing them they cannot. Radius is essentially betting that, given the right tools, a meaningful percentage of America's roughly 1.5 million licensed agents would rather run their own shop than wear someone else's logo.

Culture, briefly

Internally, the company runs on five principles it will recite if pressed: inspire through action, drive innovation, empower partners, always elevate, success is non-negotiable. Roughly 220 people work there. Offices in San Francisco and a satellite at 405 Lexington Avenue in New York. The tech stack runs on React, Next.js, Node, Python, Go, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, AWS, Docker, and an apparently genuine fondness for Playwright tests.

Why it matters tomorrow.

The US real estate industry is mid-restructuring. The NAR settlement of 2024 rewrote commission rules. Buyer's agents are negotiating fees explicitly for the first time in a generation. The pressure on margins is real, and it is not going away.

In that environment, the back-office cost structure becomes the whole game. Agents who can run lean and keep more of their reduced commissions will eat the ones who cannot. Brokerages that automate the second job - paperwork, compliance, marketing - will be the cheap places to hang a license. Brokerages that do not will be expensive places to do exactly the same work.

Radius is building for the second scenario as if the first never existed. Whether they are right depends on whether real estate, an industry famously allergic to change, finally bends. The bet is generational. The thesis is plain. The product is shipping.

It is now 5:14 in the afternoon on that same Tuesday. The Texas agent has closed her house. The Documentation Agent filed the paperwork. The Auditing Agent caught a missing disclosure before it became a lawsuit. Mel sent the wire confirmation. The agent never opened a contract. She never opened the platform either. She is at her son's soccer game.

This is the part Radius is selling. Not the AI. The soccer game.

Where to find them.

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