Finance · Technology · Leadership

I solve complex problems—sometimes with financial engineering, sometimes with software, often with both.

My background is in structured finance and real estate debt. I spent a decade advising institutional investors on interest rate risk, then managed a $2.5B portfolio through a challenging market cycle. Along the way, I started competing in AI hackathons, learned to build software, and discovered that the same frameworks I use for financial risk translate surprisingly well to product design and technical systems.

Laurie Sartain
$20B+ Assets Under Advisory
12+ Years in Capital Markets
$116B Debt Advised (CIRM)
Experience

Interest Rate Risk Advisory

Managing Director

The Corporation for Interest Rate Management (CIRM)
Laurie Sartain professional headshot

Interest rate caps used to be a rounding error in real estate deals. Then they became seven-figure decisions — and most borrowers' approach didn't change. They hedged because lenders required it, not because anyone was analyzing structure, strike, and term across their portfolio.

I spent nearly a decade at CIRM advising institutional clients across $20B+ in assets, helping borrowers treat hedging as a portfolio-level strategic decision rather than a deal-level compliance exercise. CIRM was founded in 1981 and has advised on more than $116B in debt over the past three years.

I left to join PCCP, where I managed a $2.5B levered real estate debt portfolio — the other side of the table. When the market turned, I re-underwrote collateral assets and structured loan modifications that secured $25M in cash equity on $230M in troubled loans. That work required understanding borrower financials and the rate environment simultaneously.

I'm back at CIRM now, focused on helping real estate investors and developers make better decisions about rate exposure. Forty years of institutional expertise, applied to a market where the cost of getting hedging wrong has never been higher.

Visit CIRM
Focus

Debt Fund Analytics

Floating-rate CRE debt funds are managing billions in loans where every rate reset, cap expiration, and hedge decision affects portfolio-level returns. Most manage this exposure loan by loan in spreadsheets. The tools haven't caught up to the complexity of the portfolios.

I'm building analytics and advisory capabilities specifically for institutional debt fund portfolio managers — portfolio-level rate exposure visibility, hedge optimization across a book of loans, and cash flow analysis that connects individual loan economics to fund-level IRR. The goal is to give PMs the same precision on the liability side that they already expect on the asset side.

This work draws on my experience at PCCP managing a levered debt portfolio, a decade of rate risk advisory at CIRM, and the software development skills I've built over the past two years.

Recognition

Projects & Wins

AI Energy Derivatives
June 2025

Panoptic

MARA Holdings Hackathon · 1st Place · 1 Bitcoin (~$103K)
MARA Hackathon winning moment

MARA Holdings is the second-largest corporate holder of Bitcoin. They challenged participants to build an AI-driven system to arbitrage energy and AI inference prices across their global data center portfolio.

My team built Panoptic, a platform that integrates satellite data with real-time energy pricing to optimize compute allocation and infrastructure investment. The system includes a global visualization of MARA's data centers, AI-powered analysis for battery storage buildouts and expansion siting, an automated energy treasury that deploys power based on grid pricing, and a derivatives platform for hedging Bitcoin and energy exposure.

The derivatives component drew directly on my background in interest rate risk—the same hedging frameworks that work for real estate debt also work for energy and crypto treasury.

Team: Ali Can Acar, Jonathan Laplante, Rolan Marat, Laurie Sartain
Read more View deck
AI Agents UX Evolutionary Systems
June 2025

Survival of the Feature

AI Engineer World's Fair · 1st Place · Keynote Presenter
Presenting at AI Engineer World's Fair keynote

Traditional A/B testing is slow and manual. I designed a system that applies evolutionary biology to user interfaces—beneficial changes propagate, harmful ones die off, and the UX evolves autonomously.

Survival of the Feature uses two AI agents working in coordination. The first generates UX variations and deploys them to a sample of users. The second applies statistical analysis to real-time user response, determining whether each variation improves engagement while calibrating how quickly to expand exposure. It's similar to natural selection, except data accelerates the process.

We won first place out of 45 teams and presented at the conference keynote.

Team: Armin Foroughi, Salim Masmoudi, Laurie Sartain
Watch keynote View deck
AI Computer Vision Real Estate
2024

Roofi: AI-Powered Drone Analysis for Property Assessment

Aparavi Hackathon · 1st Place
Aparavi Hackathon winning team

My first hackathon. Built an automated rooftop inspection system that analyzes aerial drone footage to detect property issues including cracks, missing tiles, leaks, and debris. The tool extracts frames from drone videos and processes them through Google Gemini's vision API to identify maintenance concerns at scale.

Technical approach:

  • Python pipeline using ffmpeg for frame extraction at configurable intervals
  • Batch processing system for analyzing hundreds of images from a single flight
  • JSON response consolidation for downstream reporting and visualization
  • Bash orchestration for production deployment

Impact: Won first place at the Aparavi AI Hackathon, demonstrating practical applications of computer vision for real estate due diligence. The tool addresses a significant pain point in property assessment—manual roof inspections are time-consuming, expensive, and often miss issues visible only from above.

Stack: Python, Google Gemini API, ffmpeg, bash

Team: Armin Foroughi, Salim Masmoudi, Laurie Sartain
AI Agents Computer Vision Real Estate
2025

SpotCheck: AI Construction Monitoring Agent

AWS MCP Agents Hackathon · 3rd Place (50+ teams)
SpotCheck - drone over construction site

Construction site monitoring typically costs $1,500 per visit — about $18,000 annually per project — and the information is delayed and incomplete by the time it reaches stakeholders. You're paying for monthly snapshots when you need a continuous feed.

SpotCheck is a multimodal AI agent that analyzes daily drone footage to monitor construction sites in real time. The system generates 3D site models, runs automated OSHA compliance scanning between scheduled inspections, and flags delays and potential cost overruns early enough to intervene. Users can speak with the agent conversationally — querying specific areas of a site, comparing progress against timeline, or pulling up safety concerns — instead of waiting for a consultant's next visit.

The hackathon required chaining at least three sponsor tools via MCP (Model Context Protocol) into an end-to-end agentic workflow. We built SpotCheck on AWS with Minimax for video understanding, BEM for 3D reconstruction, and Operant for agent security — connecting drone capture to spatial analysis to a conversational interface a project manager could actually use.

This was the second drone-powered real estate project in two weeks, following our first-place win at the Aparavi Hackathon with Roofi. The through-line: aerial imagery and computer vision applied to inspection problems that are currently manual, expensive, and infrequent.

Team: Armin Foroughi, Salim Masmoudi, Laurie Sartain View on DevPost
Community

Civic Engagement

ULI San Francisco

Co-chair of the Young Leaders Programming Committee in San Francisco. Guesting on the national Public Private Partnership Council (PPPC Gold) at ULI's 2026 Spring Meeting in Nashville.

Building Community Leaders

Completed the inaugural cohort of the BCL Campaign Boot Camp, a program focused on developing leaders for public service and civic engagement in San Francisco.

Frontier Tower

Democratically elected to the Governance Committee by the community and selected by the committee as chair.

MAKE Literary Productions

Board member. Previously served as Interim Executive Director and Board Chair.

Leadership

Nonprofit Leadership

Interim Executive Director

MAKE Literary Productions
September 2024 – September 2025
Laurie Sartain with Sofia Samatar at MAKE Literary Productions

MAKE Literary Productions is an international arts nonprofit connecting writers between Chicago and Mexico City. When the founder of 17 years departed, I stepped in as Interim Executive Director to lead the transition.

The work involved major governance restructuring and organizational strategy to position the nonprofit as a fundable, sustainable venture. I worked with staff and the board to run a highly competitive search process to identify our new Executive Director, Sofia Gabriel—an arts administrator, curator, and producer with an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I also built the organization's CRM from scratch—contact management, donation tracking, grant deadlines with year-over-year feedback analysis, pipeline management. The system ingested 17 years of QuickBooks data, matched transactions to contacts, deduplicated records, and built out the donor network automatically. The team is using it now, and I'm continuing to develop the platform for other organizations.

Read the announcement
About

Background

I studied mathematics and English literature at the University of Chicago—a combination that taught me to think in systems while staying attuned to how ideas land with people.

My career has moved between structured finance, nonprofit leadership, and technology. I've found that the analytical frameworks transfer surprisingly well: risk assessment, stakeholder management, building under constraints. Whether I'm structuring a hedge, designing a product, or running an organization, the core problem-solving approach is the same.

I'm always happy to connect—whether you're navigating capital markets questions, building something interesting, or just want to grab coffee.

Credentials

Financial Risk Manager (FRM) Global Association of Risk Professionals
CFA Level I CFA Institute
B.A. Mathematics & English Literature University of Chicago