Serial entrepreneur Oliver Alexander is back with a new startup building software to address inefficiency in real estate development.
Called Prophetic, the software has been available for users on the West Coast for the last month and a half, Alexander said. The team opted for a soft launch and then a more public launch in September.
The product is meant for real estate developers broadly but the focus at launch is optimizing the product for subdivision home builders, said Alexander.
Prophetic collects data on everything surrounding a property including city and county zoning and building requirements, ownership, transit info, topography, demographics and flood maps. The information comes from data partners and the startup’s own extraction from government records.
The startup then adds a layer of its own artificial intelligence to show customers development potential of different parcels of land.
“We’ve been in beta with subdivision builders and commercial brokers in May and June,” said Alexander, adding that the feedback has been valuable. He noted those users analyzed 4,100 pieces of land and tested out the different mapping layers of the tool to tell the team what they liked and what information they still wanted to see included.
Alexander is now in contract talks with several of those users, he said. The product is being sold as an enterprise software-as-a-service platform with different features available at different price points.
He said the platform excels at helping users more efficiently find and reach out to property owners before a parcel is put on the market in order to work out off market deals.
“A lot of builders and developers are working in county (web) sites, with Google maps and spreadsheets,” Alexander said. Prophetic’s platform is being built with development teams in mind so parcels can be saved in the system, projects named and then notes can be documented all in one place.
This is Alexander’s third company. He previously co-founded Orchid Health, a chain of rural health clinics that has five locations in Oregon. He is still an owner in that company and on the board. Most recently, he founded and sold the co-working company Remotely.
Remotely was started in 2018 and sold in 2021, after being upended by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Alexander’s experience with both of these companies is coming into play with Prophetic. In fact, it was his work identifying and analyzing potential sites for Orchid Health clinics that first introduced him to these development challenges.
Part of his responsibility at Orchid was identifying new development opportunities and determining if the company should buy, lease or build a facility, he said.
“I was shocked at how hard it was to assess that,” he said, adding that cobbling together the information took weeks. He started thinking about how to address this challenge but didn’t revisit the idea until early 2023, when he saw the potential AI added to the equation.
Prophetic has a team of four co-founders.
The company has been self-funded so far in addition to a $200,000 friends and family round. Alexander started fundraising in the fourth quarter of 2023, but ran into challenges amid the overall funding environment.
“We couldn’t get traction,” he said of fundraising. “I saw this as too high-value (an idea) not to pursue and decided to move forward with it myself.”
He said he prefers to bootstrap an idea. All of this companies have raised as little money as possible without sacrificing their ability to scale, he said.
Once the platform is ready to roll out nationally, he expects to try to fundraise again.
