Cambridge, Mass. — Stake, a Dubai-based fintech and real estate investment platform, is hosting and has created a 6-month work project for a team of two graduate students enrolled in the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Business Analytics degree program (MBAn).

The student’s MIT Analytics Capstone project with Stake will involve building a data ingestion and analytics model that collects historical market data on the residential market in Dubai dating back more than 10 years to evaluate the quality of potential real estate deals and forecast their returns under varying local and macro future conditions. The students are working on incorporating a large feature set of real and engineered descriptors, which will allow the model to forecast and predict price levels down to the specificity of a single building or apartment.

“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 program. “The Analytics Capstone is a core part of the MBAn curriculum, and the course provides students hands-on experience working with cutting edge analytics organizations on Big Data challenges.”

The MIT Sloan MBAn program focuses on applying the tools of modern data science, optimization, and machine learning to solve real-world business problems. Established in conjunction with the MIT Operations Research Center, the program 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 AED 500 in a matter of minutes. 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.

The platform aggregates investors who become fractional owners in the properties they select and receive their share of rental income in the form of monthly dividend distributions. Stake executes and abstracts out all operations from the investment and ownership journey end-to-end, from acquisition to exit.

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.

“Technology sits is at the heart of everything we do at Stake. It thus brings us great pleasure to host a Capstone project this year, which will form the seed of many to come and the core of our data and advanced analytics competency,” said Ricardo Brizido, Stake’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer. “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 modeling 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 program 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."

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For further information, contact:
Patricia Favreau
Associate Director of Media Relations
pfavreau@mit.edu
or
Jennifer Grady Burgos
Assistant Director of Media Relations
jgrady@mit.edu