Last week, I sat with Lior Dolinski, co-founder and CPO of Agora, to discuss how a team of veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 is modernizing the traditional world of real estate investment.

“It’s important to understand the real estate sector is the biggest asset class in the world,” he said. “And it’s not only the biggest asset class, but it’s also the most complex one and the most old-fashioned. It’s a business that is built on handshakes, communication, and relationship building. And the biggest technological advancement in the real estate space over the last 50 years was Excel.”

Agora was founded in 2019 as a proptech/fintech SaaS platform to modernize how real estate investment firms manage capital, investors, reporting, and operations. It addresses a historically manual, “Excel-heavy” industry by automating core processes and providing a unified platform for both investment managers and their investors.

Real estate is one of the largest asset classes globally, but tech adoption has been slow compared to industries like finance or software. Agora is part of a broader wave of digital transformation in proptech, where technology is pushing efficiency gains into entrenched, offline processes.

Today, the company serves real estate investment firms globally, but particularly in the US, Europe, Australia, and Israel, and manages tens of billions in assets on its platform.

Dolinski shared the journey from a failed blockchain idea to building an operating system that manages billions of dollars in assets. “We were fascinated by the realm of possibilities of what tech could do to real estate,” he added, thinking back to what inspired him to establish the company with co-founders Bar Mor (CEO) and Noam Kahan (CTO). “So we started with this intersection of blockchain and real estate with a totally different idea - talking about liquidity: how can we provide liquidity to real estate asset owners?”

Agora has raised almost $64 million, including a $34 million Series B last year led by Qumra Capital with participation from Insight Partners and Aleph. In 2025, it was named as one of Israel’s Most Promising Startups by Calcalist, and each founder was included in Forbes’ "30 Under 30” for their innovation.

We then discussed the challenges of scaling a company from Israel to the US, and the importance of maintaining a ‘Day One’ mentality in company culture, an idea inspired by Jeff Bezos. “You’re small, you’re scrappy, you’re moving fast, decisions are made super‬ fast, there’s no bureaucracy. What you have in mind is only the customer. You’re not thinking about internal challenges. You’re thinking about the challenges the customer has, and everything just happens,” he said.

Dolinski then elaborated on how ‘Day Two’ mentality is the exact opposite. “Decisions are slow, with large teams… that mentality is where companies die, according to Bezos. So we’re really trying to stay in that ‘Day One’ mentality.”

You can catch the entire interview above.

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