Ignacio Gorriti, the 24-year-old from Mar del Plata who put Roomix on Silicon Valley’s radar
Ignacio Gorriti creó Roomix, una plataforma que utiliza inteligencia artificial para ordenar búsquedas inmobiliarias según las necesidades de cada usuario y que ya atrajo inversores de Silicon Valley.
Looking for an apartment in Argentina has not changed much since real estate portals first appeared: rigid filters, repeated listings and results ordered less by what the buyer needs than by what the advertiser pays. Ignacio Gorriti was 22 and working on a university thesis about property photos when he realized the real problem was somewhere else. Today he is 24, lives in Buenos Aires and runs a platform that receives more than 380,000 visits a month, with investors who sit on the boards of OpenAI and Meta. In between came a rejection that left him with almost no savings, an email sent without much expectation and an entire week devoted to improving a single number.
A shout outside an event
San Francisco, September 2025. A 23-year-old with no investors, only a few months of product development behind him and limited savings sees the founder of Vercel leaving an event. Instead of approaching him with a prepared pitch, he shouts from a distance, in unmistakably Argentine fashion: “You have to go to Mar del Plata, Guille.” Guillermo Rauch turns around, smiles and promises he will.
That ten-second encounter became a turning point in Ignacio Gorriti’s story. A few weeks later, he sent Rauch an email with a subject line that played on their shared background —both are Argentines who reached the Valley from outside— and asked him to try the platform. Rauch replied the next day with a single comment: search was too slow. Five seconds.
Gorriti spent the following week focused on one thing. He brought the loading time down to 200 milliseconds and told Rauch about it publicly on X. In February 2026, he fell asleep with his computer open and woke up to an email confirming that Vercel’s founder was investing in his startup.
From sign language to real estate
The story did not begin in the United States. In 2022, while studying Systems Engineering at UNICEN in Tandil, Gorriti published an artificial intelligence prototype capable of recognizing sign language. The post went viral and surpassed 200,000 likes within days. It was his first entry into Argentina’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, driven more by technical curiosity than by strategy.
Two years later, at a technology event in Mar del Plata, he met Iñaki Valencia. Roomix came out of that conversation. The first version —which also became Gorriti’s university thesis— focused on something much narrower than a search engine: using AI to improve photographs in property listings. They managed to bring the cost per image below one cent, compared with the US$5 the market was charging.
Real estate agencies kept giving them the same feedback. They liked the tool, but it did not help with the one thing that mattered most: appearing at the top of property portals. Better photographs did not get you there. Paying did.
The diagnosis that changed the product
The missing piece arrived during a call with Mariano Otero, the businessman who introduced Uber to Argentina. Otero pointed out something simple: searching for a home was practically the same experience it had been fifteen years earlier. Gorriti hung up, went down in the elevator and pitched the idea to a friend. The response —that he was crazy, but there was something there— was enough. That same month, he built the search engine prototype.
The logic behind it is easy to summarize: traditional portals monetize positioning, not relevance. The more someone pays, the higher the listing appears. Roomix reversed that logic and ranks results according to what each user is actually looking for, adding variables that conventional filters do not usually include: price per square meter, floor level, proximity to parks or bars, travel time from a specific address and even a natural-light score calculated from orientation, height and windows.
The night Switzerland said no
Before San Francisco came a much less photogenic chapter. Gorriti was selected for the Star Global Fellowship, a four-month program that brings together thirty entrepreneurs from Latin America and Africa in Switzerland. He went with one clear goal: win the internal pitch competition and return to Argentina with funding.
He lost. The partner who had closely followed Roomix throughout the program told him he did not see enough potential in the project. Gorriti later told Forbes Argentina that he fell apart that night. He returned home without funding and with his savings almost gone.
What followed was a call from Otero offering to invest and a US$45,000 mini-round led by the Picante fund. That kept the company going. There was also a final twist: some of the people who had rejected him during that Swiss pitch eventually became investors in the round Roomix closed in 2026.
Who put up the half-million
The US$500,000 pre-seed round came together over three months, between February and April 2026. Along with Rauch, investors included Adam D’Angelo —founder of Quora, Facebook’s CTO until 2008 and a member of OpenAI’s board— and Charlie Songhurst, Microsoft’s former Head of Global Strategy and a member of Meta’s board. The list also includes Auth0 cofounder Damián Schenkelman, a follow-on investment from Picante, investors from Cocos Capital and founders from Takenos.
Songhurst gave Gorriti a comparison he often repeats: the current moment in AI resembles the arrival of the smartphone, when it was obvious that someone would eventually build the photo app. Then he added a prediction: given the timing, Roomix could become the Mercado Libre of real estate.
The numbers and the fine print
In April 2026, the platform recorded 250,000 monthly sessions and generated 12,000 contacts between users and real estate agencies, with more than 100,000 accumulated interactions. By July, monthly visits had surpassed 380,000, with a stated goal of exceeding one million before the end of the year. Monthly growth is running at around 26%.
One methodological clarification matters: Roomix’s position as the fourth most visited property search site in Argentina —behind Zonaprop, Mercado Libre and Argenprop— comes from the company’s own comparative analysis using publicly available portal data, not from an external audit. It is a reasonable figure to cite, as long as that distinction is made clear. Something similar happened with Gorriti’s age: several outlets continued using “22 years old” in headlines based on earlier articles, even though Forbes Argentina interviewed him after he had already turned 24.
How it makes money and what comes next
Users searching for properties pay nothing. Revenue comes from real estate agencies, which subscribe to a WhatsApp assistant available 24 hours a day. It searches for properties for their clients, schedules visits and keeps a record of every interaction. The price is US$30 per agent. The platform’s entire infrastructure costs around US$1,000 a month, which helps explain how the operation managed to survive for months without venture capital.
With the round closed, the plan is to build a team of four or five people, invest in marketing and consolidate the business in Argentina before expanding abroad. Pascal Ordano, an ITBA student, was the first engineer to join. The app launch —with a voice assistant and map interface— was scheduled for August 2026, together with a B2B tool for optimizing property listings.
Mexico and Spain are the markets that interest the team most, although Gorriti does not want to close off other possibilities. He describes himself as pragmatic and admits the opportunity could just as easily emerge in Southeast Asia. His benchmark is Zillow, the U.S. company valued at more than US$10 billion. His stated ambition is for Roomix to become the global standard for property search.
