Prophia, a startup building a platform that scours and extracts key terms from commercial real estate contracts, raised $10.2 million in a Series A round led by Cercano Management, formerly Vulcan Capital.
Prophia’s users can upload PDF contracts that are analyzed by its software. The tool spits out key terms such as square footage and dates in the lease, which gets reviewed by an expert. The company says its software has handled more than a million pages of documents across 1,800 locations.
The company is not involved in the commercial leasing and negotiation process and tenants do not have access to its platform.
Increasing competition in the commercial real estate sector has forced many companies to adopt tech in order to operate faster, CEO and co-founder Cameron Steele told GeekWire. This has provided a tailwind for the startup amid a slowdown in the broader market.
Rising interest rates brought on by inflation and the growing adoption of hybrid work has slowed the commercial real estate sector. In the third quarter, more than 1.3 million more square feet of office space sat vacant and went on the market compared to what was leased, according to data from the National Association of Realtors.
Prophia is joining a crowded list of companies offering lease abstraction and consulting services to commercial real estate businesses. Steele said the startup will compete with NTrust, Realogic, Accenture, MRI Software and DealSumm, among others. Prophia also competes with traditional spreadsheets and the manual services industry, Steele said.
The startup, previously called LeasABLE, is co-headquartered between San Francisco and Seattle.
Seattle is home to a growing number of startups that use AI and natural language processing tech for a variety of use cases. Lexion, Advocat, and Clearbrief help legal teams sift through different types of contracts. Unwrap and Spiral provide companies with insights based on their customer feedback data. Companies including Augment, Xembly and Seasalt provide secretary-like tools that can take notes from meeting transcripts.
The fresh funding for Prophia will be used to boost product development, as well as grow its sales, marketing and commercial teams. The company currently has 32 employees, with 18 based in Seattle.
Steele’s most recent roles include executive positions at OpenTable and Booking.com. He was also a founding member and COO of hotel marketing startup Buuteeq, which was acquired by Priceline in 2014. He is joined by CTO Chris Hsu, who held senior engineering roles at Buuteeq and Booking.com, among others.
Other venture investors in Prophia include SignalFire and Spear Street Capital. The startup had two previous funding rounds, bringing its total capital raised to $15.3 million. It did not reveal a valuation.
As seen in Geekwire: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/prophia-which-extracts-info-from-commercial-real-estate-contracts-raises-10-2m/