How do you build AI for one of the world's largest, most valuable, and least digitised industries?
In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Dr. Kate Jarvis, CEO & Co-Founder of Fifth Dimension, the AI company transforming how institutional real estate investors make decisions.
With a PhD from Stanford in machine learning and linguistics, Kate has spent her career applying AI to complex industries. Today, Fifth Dimension is building what she describes as the Bloomberg Terminal for real assets, helping some of the world's largest property investors replace spreadsheets, PDFs and manual workflows with AI-powered decision intelligence.
The conversation explores why commercial real estate has remained decades behind other financial markets, how AI is finally unlocking the sector, and what it takes to build enterprise software for one of the world's most relationship-driven industries.
Kate also shares candid insights on fundraising in today's AI market, founder-led sales, pricing AI products, and why Europe may have a unique advantage in the next wave of vertical AI companies.
Topics Covered
• Why commercial real estate remains one of the world's least digitised industries
• Building the Bloomberg Terminal for institutional property investors
• How AI transforms underwriting, portfolio management and investment decisions
• Why decision intelligence matters more than simply collecting more data
• The challenge of changing behaviour in relationship-driven industries
• Founder-led sales and scaling enterprise go-to-market teams
• Pricing AI products while managing token costs and unit economics
• Building vertical AI companies versus foundation models
• The differences between fundraising in Europe and the US
• Why Europe could become the leader in vertical AI applications
• The realities of raising venture capital as an AI founder
• Founder resilience, conviction and building through uncertainty
This is a conversation about applying AI where it creates the greatest economic value, why enterprise transformation is ultimately about people rather than technology, and what it takes to modernise one of the world's biggest industries.
