MGMT Boston - W5, Q4 24 - PredictAP / 2025 Predictions from 186 Ventures / The Lantern
PredictAP / 2025 Predictions from 186 Ventures / The Lantern
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TLDR:
PredictAP - an AI-powered invoice capture platform to codify tribal knowledge and modernize software tooling in a traditionally “offline” real estate industry.
Thanks to David Stifter for reaching out
2025 Predictions with 186 Ventures - 4 predictions to watch for 2025 (vertical AI, service business models, capital efficiency, and knowledge graphs)
Thanks to Giuseppe, Julian & Sophie for hosting us
The Lantern Last Week: Palash Soni, Goldcast / Andy Palmer, Entrepreneur & Investor / The Market is Getting Better
The Lantern is brought to you by Innovation Economy Banking at J.P. Morgan this September
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - a community and opportunity engine for 80+ Boston based up & coming venture backed operators
The Lantern Short Form Video Series (YT) - Intro Trailer / Simon Taylor, HYCU / Nathan Rosenberg & Marc Printz, Farmblox / Jenni Goodman, Underscore / Jason Lavender, Electives / Daniel Pelaez, Cyvl / Sean Smith, Denim / Palash Soni, Goldcast / Andy Palmer, Entrepreneur & Investor / The Market is Getting Better
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - 2024 Companies to Watch (evolving list)
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Laura Andre / Qunett, Dana Louie / InvoiceCloud, Sarah Clarkson / Vestmark
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 Q1 Recap / 2024 Q2 Recap / 2024 Q3 Recap
PredictAP
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!
2025 Predictions from 186 Ventures
We gathered dozens of operators from the MGMT Boston Operators Club and local founders with the 186 Ventures team in October to discuss the evolution of our dear software markets, the status of some predictions for 2024 (all looking good!), and what’s on deck for next year.
General Partner Giuseppe Stuto led us through the following predictions for 2025 to share with you all..
We will see more vertical AI applications manifest themselves within the Enterprise in a similar ways that SaaS moved from horizontal to vertical use cases
We will see services business models more common and software budget purchasing models less common - SaaS may even be given away for cheap/free as a “way in”
Capital efficiency, on a relative basis, will almost be required to create enduring & compounding defensible enterprise value. Details like procurement cycle lengths and creativity with non-dilutive financing, like leveraging revenue based financing tools for example, will all matter
Specific to AI, premiums will be placed on applications that can actually get “reasoning” right. All purpose LLMs still have a ways to go and there are multiple approaches with the “jury still out” on how to get context and reasoning right. Infrastructure solutions that use general purpose or customizable knowledge graphs to help application developers get to 100% (enterprise acceptable accuracy) will emerge OR savvy application developers will fill the gaps themselves. We will likely see both, depending upon the specific case!
Thank you Giuseppe, Julian, and Sophie for a great discussion and evening!
186 Ventures, named after the constant speed of light (186,000 MPH), is an emerging seed stage venture capital firm here in Boston investing thematically across software sectors. The team brings full operational and strategic support and an unparalleled network to founders when they need it most – at the beginning. They focus primarily on the Northeast of the US, although they have demonstrated an ability to deploy into high growth startups in San Francisco, LA, and other select US cities.
The Lantern: Palash Soni, Goldcast / Andy Palmer, Entrepreneur & Engineer
The Lantern is brought to you this month by Innovation Economy Banking at J.P. Morgan
Last week on The Lantern..
Palash Soni sheds some light on Goldcast’s new chapter, the natural language of B2B marketers, and what he has learned building this growth stage startup:
Andy Palmer talks about his portfolio career, how to live for a living, capital efficiency, and why Boston is a special place to be building a startup:
The Lantern - a short form video series by MGMT Boston featuring the best startups (+founders), ecosystem leaders, and ferociously talented operators in Boston
W8: Palash Soni, Goldcast / Andy Palmer, Entrepreneur & Investor / The Market is Getting Better
W7: Daniel Pelaez, Cyvl / Sean Smith, Denim
W6: Jenni Goodman, Underscore / Jason Lavender, Electives / Productize Yourself
W5: Simon Taylor, HYCU / Nathan Rosenberg & Marc Printz, Farmblox
W4: Remen Okoruwa, Propexo / Amelia Van Camp, Mirakl
W3: Alex Ewing, OneScreen / Jess Lynch, FoundersEdge / What is MGMT Boston? And Why?
W2: Aniketh Mohanty, Wayfair / Amber Nigam, Basys.ai / W2 Summary (The Agents are Coming)
W1: Trailer Launch / Markit AI / W1 Summary (Setting the Culture)
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Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt