These two longtime friends are using AI to take the busywork out of property management

It all started with a glass of wine and a shared frustration.

Alex Castro and his wife – both property managers – were unwinding on the couch after a long day when the conversation turned, as it often did, to work. Specifically, the headaches of managing RFPs: finding vendors, gathering bids, checking compliance, signing contracts. It was clunky. It was manual. It was boring.

“There’s nothing sexy about procurement,” Castro told Refresh Miami. “But the more we talked, the more obvious it became that the whole process was broken.”

Castro, who also has a background in fintech and spent years at American Express, realized his pain wasn’t unique. Property managers everywhere were dealing with the same mess of spreadsheets, emails, and outdated workflows. So, he called his old FIU fraternity brother and longtime friend Martin Falconi.

Falconi, originally from Ecuador, had spent over a decade helping Fortune 500 companies streamline spend management through procurement consulting. He knew just how sophisticated (and expensive) those systems could get. 

But he also saw the opportunity: “How do we take what these big companies are doing, and build a simple, easy-to-use platform for the rest of the market?”

That call turned into RFx Suite, a Miami-based startup that’s bringing procurement tools powered by AI to small and midsize property managers.

Here’s how it works: Property managers input basic specs – how many units, project scope, preferred vendors – and the platform uses AI to generate a full RFP. RFx Suite then helps match them with relevant vendors or allows them to invite their own. Proposals come in through the platform, and AI kicks in again to extract and compare pricing, timelines, and compliance documents. Contracts can be automatically generated, analyzed for risk, and signed all within the same tool.

RFx Suite has already secured some major wins for early clients. For one in particular, over 45 days, they freed up a day’s worth of admin time per project, cut procurement cycle times by 36%, and negotiated $17,000 in savings.

The two co-founders built the platform on Bubble, which let them iterate fast. “If a beta user requests a feature, we can implement it and ship it within a couple hours,” Castro said. RFx Suite currently has around 40 beta users, including residential and commercial property managers, plus service providers like HVAC and landscaping companies.

“In the enterprise world, companies spend millions on multiple tools: one for sourcing, another for contracting, another for vendor onboarding,” Falconi explained. “None of them talk to each other. We’re combining all of that into one simple workflow.”

The Miami connection runs deep. Castro moved to the city in 2003. Falconi went to college here and later returned after a stint away. And in many ways, Miami is the perfect launchpad. “There’s real estate everywhere,” Castro said. “Construction, renovations, rising costs all mean that property managers are under pressure to make smart decisions faster. That’s where we come in.”

While they’ve bootstrapped so far, RFx Suite recently joined Aligned Foundry, a program that helps early-stage founders grow their businesses while balancing work and family life. “It’s been great to get investor coaching without the pressure of a full raise,” Falconi said.

Still, growth is top of mind. “We want to scale nationwide,” said Castro. “But our north star is always serving the user. Every time a property manager tells us, ‘This saved me hours,’ or ‘I wish I had this years ago,’ that’s what keeps us going.”

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Riley Kaminer