December 5, 2022
The Inspiration
Commercial real estate is one of the world’s largest and most competitive asset classes - but participants are still hindered with poor quality, opaque data and antiquated tools, leading to high transaction costs, long deal lead times, and a huge service infrastructure that burdens everyone. But things are starting to change, and I’m proud to announce our $10m Series A financing round to further our vision of reshaping the commercial real estate market around data.
Starting at my first job at Oracle back in the 1990’s, I was trained early to see the value of centralized, structured, and actionable data to businesses. When thinking about starting a company back in 2017 (and knowing I wanted to start another vertical SaaS business), I was stunned when I learned that the commercial real estate industry was operating as if it was still the 1980’s - primarily utilizing manual data entry and manual data compilation for most analytical and reporting tasks. Incredibly, the industry totally lacks a “system of record” for building data. So when we started Prophia back in 2018, we had a simple goal: make commercial building data trusted and accessible, give time back to our customers, and provide tools for insights and decision-making.
While most other industries have embraced modern computing practices years ago, why now for CRE, after being so slow for so long? There are a few contributing factors that are driving the timing and urgency of adoption of innovation. First, the market volatility associated with the pandemic, rising interest rates, back to office worries, and an impending recession all are creating urgency for change. New technology, particularly Cloud, AI/ML, and new tools are helping drive down costs and helping scale data acquisition. But most importantly, competition in the market among institutional participants continues to grow - and for those firms and investors that want to win, they know they need a data advantage.
What We’re Bringing to the Table
Prophia is the solution to this antiquated, costly, and inefficient system and ongoing services tax. Starting with commercial lease and tenant data, the platform serves as a centralized, trusted source of data that empowers CRE building owners with the real-time data and actionable insights they need to make sound business decisions. How do we do this? With a design focus solely on the CRE industry and cutting edge AI/ML technologies, we’ve designed a system that provides trust, time and insights to commercial building data – a competitive advantage unique to our customers.
The numbers speak for themselves – over the past year, Prophia has:
- Closed our $10m Series A
- Achieved 250% annual recurring revenue
- More than doubled its customer base with some of the world's most sophisticated property owners
- Reached 170m SF of hosted AUM
- Maintained 100% customer retention
- Exceeded one million pages scanned with AI-powered technology
Now, with the support of over $10 million from our partners at Cercano Management, SignalFire and several customers who participated in the financing, we are thrilled to announce expansions to our data science, engineering and commercial teams to improve upon and expand our offerings to serve as the trusted data partner for the commercial real estate industry.
To start your journey of accessing validated portfolio data in real time to inform your business strategy and maximize your investment potential, schedule a demo today.
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