Dubai-based Stake hosts MIT student team for six-month project

Stake, a fintech and real estate investing platform based in Dubai, is hosting and has created a six-month project for a group of two graduate students enrolled in the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Business Analytics program (MBAn).

The project will entail developing a data ingestion and analytics model that will collect historical market data on Dubai’s residential market dating back over 10 years in order to assess the quality of potential real estate deals and forecast their returns under a variety of local and macro future conditions. Furthermore, the students are focusing on putting a large feature set of actual and engineered descriptions into the model, which will allow it to anticipate and estimate price levels down to the particular of a single building or unit.

“We are delighted to welcome Stake as a new host company this year and value the learning opportunity that this unique industry project offers our students,” said Michelle Li, director of the Master of Business Analytics programme. “The Analytics Capstone is a core part of the MBAn curriculum, and the course provides students hands-on experience working with cutting edge analytics organisations on big data challenges.”

The MIT Sloan MBAn programme focuses on applying the tools of modern data science, optimisation, and machine learning to solve real-world business problems. Established in conjunction with the MIT Operations Research Center, the programme answers the industry’s demand for a skilled pool of graduates who can apply advanced analytics to solve business challenges. MIT offers an analytics degree at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Launched in 2021, fintech startup Stake is a digital investment platform that curates direct real estate investment opportunities in rental homes in Dubai and allows users to participate in them with an investment as little as Dhs500. The app allows its users to browse a selection of pre-vetted investment opportunities, create their own diversified portfolios and earn regular dividends from rental income.

Stake was founded by Rami Tabbara, former senior VP of Sales at Damac Properties who has more than 15 years of real estate experience, and Manar Mahmassani, an investment banker with more than 15 years of experience at Deutsche Bank and Falcon Group, and Ricardo Brizido former CTO of Seedrs in the UK.

Ricardo Brizido, Stake’s co-founder and chief technology officer said – “Working with the students on this project has been a rewarding experience for us; the problem-solving sessions, the model revisions, and the debates over data gathering and modelling have truly helped us shape our thinking and data analytics strategy. We are eager to continue supporting the students anyway we can through the end of the programme and to follow their careers as promising data scientists.”

Team members Arkira Tanglertsumpun and Yihua Xu, both MIT Sloan MBAn Class of 2021 students, said, “Working with Stake at this important time in their journey has been an outstanding and invaluable experience. We enjoyed working directly with the startup’s execs— who have taught us to move fast and break things—to develop groundbreaking technologies that will ultimately shape the company’s competitive edge within the real-estate industry. We look forward to following Stake’s progress in the coming years.”

Read: The growth of the fintech sector in the Middle East