Founders: Russell Franks & David Stifter
Founding: 2019
Mission: The only AI-powered invoice capture solution built for Real Estate AP
Employees: 20 & ~50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $10M+ raised
Investors: RET Ventures, Wise Ventures
Key Customers: Bridge Investment Group, Garden Homes, The RMR Group, Starwood, and CA Ventures
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $25M – $50M (assuming average equity dilution in the $8M Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
PredictAP is an AI-powered invoice capture platform to codify tribal knowledge and modernize software tooling in a traditionally “offline” real estate industry. This team is building the product they wished they had, leveraging knowledge from their careers in real estate, to reconcile invoices, tax IDs, and payment flows to help real estate managers better allocate resources and capture efficiencies.
David Stifter worked for Colony Capital for almost 20 years and is an accountant by background (having studied locally at BU). David ran a dotcom business during undergrad, but their anchor VC pulled out two weeks before graduation amidst the dotcom crash, so it was back to the well worn corporate path…for a while.
David started his career at State Street before migrating to the West Coast to work at REITs like Colony Capital. He became more technical over time as an in house technology leader and led a major ERP integration to Yardi, the industry standard real estate accounting software.
David’s career was advancing. The migration went smoothly. Then Chrissa, who was a key player in Colony Capital’s AP process, retired, taking years of institutional knowledge with her.
Colony moved a lot of money around and had an internal system that helped them reconcile payments, approvals, and invoicing through a complex ownership structure. Accounting rules vary depending on whether a property in their portfolio was a multi-family asset or an industrial asset. AP isn’t glamorous, but it’s essential work to keep the engine of capitalism humming and everything compliant. So when Chrissa retired, poof! A lot of context went missing and Colony had trouble paying its bills directly.
Colony Capital manages $43B in assets (src). U.S. REITs (real estate investment trusts) own over $4.5T in gross assets which include 500k+ properties (src). You can imagine the complexity as it relates to cash flows, invoicing, tracking, etc.
David & his team couldn’t find an external solution that could match the complexity needed to organize & code their invoices. So they built an internal “invoice coding system” tool using UiPath. They leveraged structured data to build a solution that institutionalized some of the tribal knowledge that was lost when Chrissa left.
A couple years later, David bought out the rights to the internal tool with his partner Russell Franks to build a proper technical infrastructure and see if this tool could help real estate managers more broadly. Even his friend Chris Antenesse, who was working on Siri at Apple, saw the potential of this “problem to be solved.”
A year later the product was ready, and PredictAP hit the market running in 2021 to solve a very specific pain point: properly coding real estate invoices. Companies like Yardi handle payments and PredictAP is downstream of their payments platform to help with the proper invoice labeling & routing. Just like Chrissa did for Colony Capital for so many years.
PredictAP’s solution helps back office teams spend more time in the facility and less time manually updating spreadsheets and reconciling data. While most competitors focus on the payments layer, David’s team understands the problem of multi-line invoice coding best.
Using historical data and learning patterns, PredictAP can analyze past payment history to handle the complexities of real estate accounting, including multi-entity structures and property-specific invoicing rules.
Their platform is seamlessly integrated with accounting systems like Yardi, enhancing rather than disrupting current workflows. PredictAP can be implemented within 30 minutes, contrasting with year-long implementation projects common in the real estate industry. Most importantly, they are leveraging AI to deploy continuous learning, updating their models daily to make sure it captures the latest coding patterns and rules. And of course they maintain human oversight, allowing for adjustments and ensuring accuracy.
Today they have 80+ customers and can show clear 4-5x ROI on the time savings, let alone the resiliency they are building. The platform processes nearly 3M invoices annually, demonstrating its scalability. In November of 2023 they closed their $8M Series A and are on track to grow from six figures to mid seven figures of ARR in 2024. They expect to close the year at over 100% revenue growth and have seen existing customer revenue growth grow by 25%.
With a team of ~20 employees, PredictAP is positioned at the intersection of real estate, accounting, and AI technology positioning itself as a crucial player in the real estate accounting technology stack. The company plans to continue to grow in Boston, seeing itself as the essential “picks and shovels” solution in payment processing.
Operators to Know (Locally):
- Greg Achenbach, VP of Product
- Kristina Durr, Software Engineer
- Ethan Neidhart, Software Engineer
- Ali Noel, Director of GTM Enablement
- Tony Scalese, VP of Customer Success
- Emma Whitman, Product Manager
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the PredictAP team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the most important parts of PredictAP’s 2025 plan?
- What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 20 employees?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about PredictAP you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more real estate investors into the digital age. All capitalists applaud your efforts. See you around town!