Prophia CEO, Cameron Steele, Featured in the San Francisco Business Times

[ San Francisco, CA, November 2023 ] CRE is a massive industry with an equally massive data problem. A problem Prophia Co-Founder and CEO, Cameron Steele, set out in 2018 to fix. One writer, Simon Campbell recently, captured in a San Francisco Business Times article featuring the Proptech entrepreneur.

The piece begins with Cameron’s background, specifically his father’s decades-long career in CRE. After graduating from Stanford, Cameron began his career with a handful of leadership positions at legacy companies like Oracle and Booking.com as well as within private equity.

It was through this experience, that he quickly spotted the glaring data gaps that persisted throughout CRE, specifically, it struck him that so many leading firms were managing their critical contractual data with “pre-internet manual services” when the world around them was starting to adopt tech to optimize and conduct business.

“Digitization is happening with all legacy industries. They’re just trying to look for ways to be more efficient. And it’s just starting, but it’s going to be an incredible point of leverage for a lot of industries, particularly in real estate, where they haven’t really benefited from what I call ‘traditional productivity gains’ from technology in the past,” Cameron explained to SFBT.

While many CRE leaders are still warming up to the idea of automation, the hypothesis that built Prophia has started to resonate with the next generation of CRE professionals who view AI and technology as must-haves for their firm’s business intelligence, “...lease summaries are very subjectively accurate because it’s a person literally sitting down and typing things up. And I think that’s going away in time. That kind of work is just better done with technology.”

There are other challenges, besides slow adoption, that Prophia faces, however. In the Business Times Cameron explained that when Prophia secured Series A funding, “the market turned” and “there was a lot of uncertainty in the market.” That was 2022; today market conditions like high interest rates and limited capital continue to pose additional challenges for tech vendors and commercial real estate leaders alike.

In spite of this, Cameron and his team recognize the opportunities that exist in CRE. Until now, there has never been an AI-backed solution built specifically to handle the data and operational challenges of this crucial business sector. “It’s all about trust with verification. We’re in the trust and accessibility business,” Cameron stated in the SFBT feature, and he’s absolutely right.

To date, Prophia is the only AI solution on the market with an extensive proprietary dataset capable of delivering the data accuracy and portfolio intelligence that CRE needs to thrive. With any luck, Cameron and the team envision that the adoption of contract digitization will become the industry standard and Prophia will be there to foster tech innovation in the CRE sector for the first time.

To learn more about Prophia and Co-Founder Cameron Steele, you can read his entire interview in the San Francisco Business Times.