Ahmed Bukhamseen, CEO of Quant.
At the recent Huawei Cloud Summit in Barcelona, Gulf Business spoke with Ahmed Bukhamseen, CEO of Quant, about how the Saudi-based AI-driven real estate platform is transforming the Kingdom’s property sector.
Bukhamseen discusses tackling data challenges, leveraging satellite technology, and why Huawei Cloud plays a key role in Quant’s expansion — including its latest move into Dubai.
Ahmad, thank you for speaking with Gulf Business. What is Quant’s core business? Which market does it primarily cater to?
Quant is an AI-powered real estate and location ecosystem. We are working on digitalising real estate data in Saudi Arabia. We help real estate investors, developers, and portfolio managers, along with retailers, with real estate analytics insights and data, as well as seamless digital transaction facilitation.
What were the main challenges Quant faced during its digital transformation?
Initially, it was data acquisition. We were working on creating our own data hub, and integrating with governmental sources was a challenge. However, the government became more open to open data, leveraging this transition to increase market transparency. We were one of the pioneer companies in Saudi Arabia to use open data within our product.
How did Quant originate?
The idea stemmed from a major gap in the real estate market — despite being one of the largest financial service industries, Saudi Arabia lacked a real-time price index. Billions were being traded without accurate financial statistics. If someone wanted to know the average property price in a Riyadh neighbourhood, they would only find outdated data, not real-time insights. Our goal was to bridge this gap by providing up-to-date market data. Beyond that, we aimed to answer the critical “where” question — where investors should invest, where retailers should open, and ultimately, where opportunities lie. Solving this “where” problem became our core mission.
Is Quant involved in satellite data analyses?
We turned to space to transform the real estate market. Satellite data is one of our primary sources, providing real-time insights into urban development, construction monitoring, and land status — offering a significant advantage with this advanced technology. In the past, accessing such data was costly, but today, it has become far more accessible. Additionally, from an AI perspective, we have developed multiple computer vision models to analyse satellite imagery, generating specialised data layers tailored to our clients’ needs.
Why did Quant choose Huawei Cloud as a partner? Which technologies or services from Huawei Cloud attracted Quant?
Most of our services rely on Huawei, and we are migrating our entire infrastructure to Huawei Cloud — including storage, databases, AI training, AI deployment, and our map server — all within Huawei and Riyadh. What draws us to Huawei is its cloud performance. We experienced latency issues with our previous provider, and with over a million users relying on our app, speed is a top priority. Users are accustomed to the fast experience of Google Maps, so they expect a similar level of responsiveness when zooming in. Since our storage is located near Western Europe, latency is significantly reduced, making high performance the key reason for our switch to Huawei.
How has Huawei Cloud helped Quant address technical challenges in its business? What are the specific application scenarios? (e.g., big data analytics, BI recommendation systems, cloud infrastructure, etc.)
When it comes to cloud infrastructure, Huawei provides us with strategic guidance on optimising our application. Their expertise helps us refine our cloud architecture, reducing costs and improving data transfer efficiency between services, ultimately accelerating our processes. Additionally, they facilitate connections with Chinese satellite imagery providers and mapping solutions. As a partner within Huawei’s network, we are also exploring collaborations to develop a digital twin for Saudi Arabia.
What are Quant’s future plans?
Today, we’re launching a real estate digital wallet, allowing users to register their properties, receive instant valuations, and list them for sale, mortgages, or other transactions. Currently, this service is available only to large portfolio managers, but we aim to make it accessible to small retail investors — even those with just one property — so they can benefit from the same intelligence and insights.
Next, we’re focusing on streamlining site selection for retailers, offering a fully digital journey from choosing a location to opening a store. Our mission is to digitise real estate data, leveraging insights to help individuals and businesses grow and contribute to the economy.
We’re also expanding to Dubai, collaborating with the Dubai Land Department to support Saudi investors in maximising their real estate investments in Dubai.
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