PropTech · Marketplace · Kenya · 47 counties · 2026
Karibu
A diaspora-first real-estate platform with an AI brain that answers “is this price fair?” — and can't invent a number.
Client: Karibu (a Genius Co venture)
The challenge
Kenyan diaspora buyers — established professionals abroad — face the “Mzungu tax”: existing portals optimise for international wallets and inflated agent pricing. Their fear of being scammed outweighs price sensitivity, so they need defensible, ground-truth pricing and a diaspora-native buying experience that doesn't exist on the market.
What we delivered
The build
- 01A nationwide listings marketplace across 47 counties, with high-resolution galleries re-hosted from bot-walled portals via a self-hosted headless worker.
- 02A grounded, citation-gated AI copilot that answers natural-language pricing and market questions (“is this Kilimani 4-bed at 28M fair?”) — where deterministic scoring computes every number and the AI only narrates it.
- 03An investor risk-report engine: deterministic 5-dimension scoring produces an A–F grade, narrated by Claude with sources.
- 04A native CRM and deal pipeline, a diaspora mortgage marketplace (bank referral), a consent-gated title-verification workflow, and a metered B2B data API with sandbox and production key tiers.
Technology & AI
The technology behind it
Compute-then-narrate with a code-enforced “no-AI-numbers” gate — the model is architecturally forbidden from inventing a figure; every number comes from deterministic scoring, the AI only writes the prose.
- ◆A pricing/risk brain where deterministic scoring runs first and a citation-enforcement gate blocks the LLM from emitting any fabricated number — the AI narrates, it never invents.
- ◆An investor risk-report engine: deterministic 5-dimension scoring → an A–F grade, narrated with sources.
- ◆A self-hosted Playwright worker that re-hosts full high-resolution galleries from bot-walled portals (batched to stay under the serverless payload limit).
- ◆A canonical property graph — a Karibu-UPI keyed to Google Plus Codes and Uber H3 geospatial indexing, with an entity-resolution resolver.
- ◆A metered B2B data API with sandbox (synthetic, instant) and admin-approved production tiers, an OpenAPI 3.1 spec and a self-serve developer portal.
Trust enforced in code, not in a prompt — the AI cannot output a price it didn't compute. Every figure is traceable to the deterministic engine behind it.
The outcome
Results
- ✓Live in production (karibuhome.world) — 43 real listings, 15 with full high-resolution photo galleries.
- ✓An operational AI brain on Claude that is code-gated against fabricating figures: every number it states is computed by a deterministic engine and traceable to it.
- ✓Privacy by design: a DPA-2019 consent ledger at signup and a 24-month device-record retention policy enforced on a cron.