In a positive sign for property technology (proptech) investor interest, Prophia, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology provider for lease abstraction and commercial real estate (CRE) data management, recently announced $10.2 million in Series A funding, which Cercano Management led.
Investor confidence in the company perhaps comes from its reported 250 percent ARR growth in 2022 and the fact that its solutions support customers across 160 million of square feet of assets under management. Prophia helps users eliminate manually intensive lease abstractions and data accessibility processes so industry leaders can more easily enhance their investment strategy with comprehensive, verifiable and structured commercial portfolio data.
The company has doubled its customer base as the CRE industry trends toward institutional buyers, leading to greater demand for advanced tech that will simplify the process. The demand has also helped Prophia retain 100 percent of its customers and expand its technology suite. The company reports that it exceeded 1 million pages scanned with its AI-powered technology, extracting text and characters.
“As a longtime customer of Prophia, the technology is a clear leader in CRE data management, providing insights and capabilities that help us make strategic, timely, and data-informed decisions,” said Spear Street Capital Co-Founder and President Rajiv Patel. “Our team can now extract and interpret data with clarity — a benefit that other tools in our industry have yet to solve.”
Lease abstraction tech isn’t new, but Prophia has answered the call to make accessing data more efficient. It eliminates the specifics that everyday users may find overwhelming. As the trend toward institutionalization in the CRE industry has gone up, so has private investment ownership. Between these rising trends and a vulnerable economy that’s putting pressure on CRE as an asset class, creating clear and distilled lease agreements has become increasingly more important.
Prophia will allow CRE owners and investors to interpret portfolio data accurately as they receive error-free business insights while determining their risk and exposure. Additionally, all extracted data including rents and critical dates can be found in one spot and will be updated in real time.
Users will also be able to navigate, sort and segment all lease data with customized reporting, which can help decrease the risk of expensive litigation that can come from contractual inaccuracies.
“Commercial real estate is one of the world’s largest asset classes, but investors and operators are unfortunately stuck with untrusted and incomplete data with antiquated tools,” said Prophia CEO Cameron Steel. “By focusing on providing our customers with trusted, comprehensive, and structured building data, Prophia is addressing a severe and persistent pain point in the industry.”
“With the institutional growth in commercial real estate in recent years, investors have desperately needed a true and consistent way of looking at their assets with the insights to make sound portfolio decisions in a rapidly changing market,” Cercano Management Partner Stuart Nagae said. “Prophia’s AI-powered abstraction has solved that longtime industry blind spot – and the more than 600% growth in square footage since 2020 is a fantastic indicator of the industry’s adoption of this type of technology.”
