In the fast-changing world of commercial real estate, not many business owners have embraced technology’s power to change things as boldly as Matias Recchia, the Co-Founder and CEO of Keyway. Recchia started the New York-based proptech company in 2020. Since then, he has used AI, machine learning, and data science to make small-scale commercial real estate deals faster, clearer, and easier for both businesses and investors. His goal for Keyway is to change the way small and medium-sized businesses deal with real estate and give investors the best tools to deal with a complicated market.
A Journey Based on new ideas
Recchia’s family moved around a lot because his father worked in the oil and gas industry. He was born in Argentina and grew up in Venezuela, which gave him a global perspective from a young age. Recchia started his career at Procter & Gamble after studying at the London School of Economics and graduating from college in Venezuela. There, he got his first taste of mergers and acquisitions by reporting to the CFO of Latin America. This experience helped him develop his strategic thinking and business sense. He worked as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey to improve his skills, and then he became President and COO of Vostu, the largest social gaming company in Latin America.
Recchia’s entrepreneurial spirit really shone through when he helped start IguanaFix, a top property management and maintenance platform in Latin America. Recchia sold IguanaFix to the Brazilian unicorn MadeiraMadeira in 2020 after scaling it up. Now, he is working on a new challenge: changing the way commercial real estate works in the U.S. His time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School and Schmidt Futures made him even more interested in technology-driven solutions, which led to the creation of Keyway.
Keyway: Changing the Way People Buy and Sell Commercial Real Estate
Recchia saw a big hole in the commercial real estate market, especially for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and that led to the creation of Keyway. These companies often own valuable real estate, but they don’t know how to make the most of it or have the resources to do so. Keyway solves this problem by giving medical professionals, veterinarians, and multifamily property owners a digital platform that makes transactions easier, like sale-leasebacks, rent-to-own agreements, and property expansions.
Keyway’s first product was a sale-leaseback offer that lets business owners sell their property to Keyway and lease it back. This frees up money for reinvestment while keeping the business in the same place. Traditional sale-leaseback processes can take up to 13 months and cost a lot of money. Keyway, on the other hand, closes deals in four weeks or less with no fees and pays in full cash. Keyway has bought and sold more than $50 million worth of properties in states like Georgia and Texas so far. The company hopes to reach $200 million by the end of 2022.
Keyway’s AI-powered platform is what makes it stand out. It brings together scattered market and property data into one place. Keyway uses AI, machine learning, and data science to make every step of the real estate lifecycle easier, from finding properties to underwriting them to managing them to selling them. Real estate teams have been able to do things they couldn’t do before thanks to tools like KeyComps and KeyDocs. KeyComps analyzes more than 12,000 public data points to give you real-time rental comps. This cuts the time it takes to get accurate pricing from days to seconds. KeyDocs is an AI-powered document management tool that makes it easier and more accurate to get important information out of complicated documents like leases and due diligence reports.
In 2023, Recchia made a big choice to turn Keyway into a generative AI company, with a focus on tools like the Document Copilot and Keypilot. These solutions use large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on thousands of leases to do things like lease reviews in seconds instead of weeks like they used to. Recchia told Commercial Observer in 2025 that “Keyway is starting to take over a lot of what consulting firms do on lease abstraction or due diligence management.” Keyway’s tools, like KeyComps, lower legal risks that were brought up in the RealPage lawsuit, which claimed that price-fixing was done through private data. This is because they put a lot of value on public data and openness.
A Plan for Openness and Change
Recchia’s method is based on the idea that AI should improve human knowledge, not replace it. He said at the 2025 New York City Real Estate Forum, “AI is the most revolutionary thing that has happened to real estate since Excel.” Keyway lets real estate professionals focus on strategic decision-making and vision, like reimagining neighborhoods or buildings, by automating tasks that are done over and over. The company’s dedication to openness, especially by using public data, builds trust and fairness in the market, which is good for both big institutional investors and smaller players like independent landlords.
Keyway’s effects go beyond just making things run more smoothly. The company follows environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles and focuses on affordable housing and upgrades that put residents first in its multifamily investments, especially in Class B properties in the Sun Belt. Recchia also wants to give Latin American investors more chances and make Keyway a bridge to commercial real estate in the U.S.
Supported by Visionary Investors
Keyway’s new way of doing things has gotten a lot of money, including $70 million in debt financing from Cross River and i80 Group in 2022 and a $15 million seed round led by Canvas Ventures, with Montage Ventures, FJ Labs, and Crosscut also taking part. Camber Creek and Thomvest, two of the best proptech venture capital firms, have also given the company more than $40 million. Keyway is in a good position to grow its business and keep shaking up the $5 trillion small-scale commercial real estate market. It has a team of 50 people, 30 of whom are dedicated to data science and machine learning.
Taking the Lead in Real Estate’s Future
Matias Recchia’s trip from Argentina to New York shows how hard he works to come up with new ideas and solve problems in the real world. Keyway is not only making commercial real estate deals easier, but it is also setting a new standard for how technology can add value to an industry that has been slow to change. Recchia is creating a future where real estate is easier to get to, more efficient, and fairer for everyone by using AI-powered tools and being open and fair.
Recchia’s story is an inspiration for entrepreneurs who want to combine technology with a purpose as Keyway grows. In a Forbes Business Council article, he said, “The best combination is for humans and AI to work together to make things more efficient, faster, and bigger while cutting down on time and costs.” Keyway is leading the way in the commercial real estate industry, which is about to go through a big change. Matias Recchia is at the front of that change.
