Following high-stakes pitches and rapid-fire questions, AI brokerage platform BrokerBot emerged victorious on Saturday at the National Association of REALTORS®’ Tech & Innovation 2026 Pitch Battle in New Orleans. The startup claimed the $15,000 grand prize as emerging tech companies faced off to showcase their innovations for real estate.
KytherID earned the Crowd Favorite Award, with founder and real estate broker Stephanie Jones comparing the identity verification tool to airports’ TSA PreCheck but for real estate.
Six startups competed Saturday at the NAR NXT event in the eighth annual Pitch Battle, presented by NAR’s Tech & Innovation group and sponsored by Second Century Ventures. Each finalist had four minutes to convince a live audience and a panel of industry judges that its technology could help transform real estate.
“Every great company starts as a story someone was brave enough to tell out loud,” said this year’s emcee Joseph Wibe, director at SingleKey and a two-time NAR NXT Pitch Battle winner (2023 as co-founder of Productive.ai and 2025 Crowd Favorite with SingleKey). “In four minutes, the best founders don’t just explain a product. They make you believe in a future you hadn’t imagined yet.”
Modernizing Brokerages With AI Assistants
BrokerBot’s Pitch Battle win adds to a growing list of recent industry recognition, including its selection for NAR’s 2026 REACH accelerator program and the company’s co-founder Jerimiah Taylor being named one of NAR’s 2026 Innovators of the Year.
BrokerBot provides customized AI assistants trained on a brokerage’s own policies, documents and processes. Agents can use the technology to quickly find answers to questions, get help with transactions, manage CRM tasks, create marketing materials and handle everyday administrative work.
“The recurring theme is fragmentation,” Taylor previously told NAR REALTOR® News. “Brokerage knowledge lives in a dozen places—policy PDFs, form libraries, shared drives, email threads and the heads of a few experienced people.” BrokerBot brings that information together in one place, creating a brokerage-specific AI assistant that the company positions as a more secure alternative to public consumer chatbots, particularly when handling sensitive client information.
Unlike other public-facing AI tools, “no model trains on your information,” Taylor said. “Your data stays yours, your guardrails stay on, and nothing leaves the organization.”
Related: BrokerBot Wants to Rethink How the Modern Brokerage Operates
KytherID Selected as Crowd Favorite
KytherID earned the 2026 Pitch Battle’s Crowd Favorite Award, selected through live voting by NAR NXT attendees. The company is developing identity verification technology designed to help reduce discrimination, fraud and errors in real estate transactions.
The technology allows buyers to submit offers without initially revealing their names, while verified personal information is shared only as needed throughout the transaction. KytherID integrates with existing real estate systems, reducing repeated data entry and limiting unnecessary exposure of sensitive information.
Jones, KytherID’s founder and CEO, has been in the real estate industry for 30 years and said the idea grew out of a personal experience with clients who worried their identities could influence a seller’s decision on their offer. With KytherID, sellers would initially see a buyer’s verified identification code rather than their name, allowing offers to be considered without immediately revealing personal details.
“We want people to be judged by their offer, not their name,” Jones said. “I’ve seen firsthand how valuable identity encapsulation can be for both consumers and practitioners,” Jones said. “We have an opportunity to mitigate discrimination, reduce fraud, protect personal information and make transactions more efficient.”
