TUD graduate’s AI start-up Marc bags $5m to fund US expansion

The raise brings Marc’s total funding to $6m – including a $1m raise in February this year.

New York-headquartered property management start-up Marc has raised $5m in an oversubscribed seed round to fund its US and Canadian expansion.

The round was led by Work-Bench and MXV Capital with participation from Mark Ghermazian, the co-founder and CEO of customer engagement platform Braze; Fin co-founder Des Traynor; and Irish legal tech Brightflag co-founder Ian Nolan, among others.

The raise brings Marc’s total funding to $6m – including its $1m raise in February this year backed by 23 angel investors including Wayflyer’s Jack Pierse, Hostelworld’s Tom Kennedy and SoftCo’s Susan Spence.

Founded by Technological University Dublin graduate Aaron Devitt, Marc’s platform uses AI to analyse fragmented sources of vendor contract and invoice data related to property units to help managers identify discrepancies that generally lead to overpayment.

For large institutional portfolios dealing with tens of thousands of invoices and lengthy agreements, checking every charge manually is effectively impossible, Marc argues. It estimates that every $1 unnecessarily lost through operating expenditure can erase as much as $20 in underlying asset value.

Although, close to all of the invoices received across the industry are currently unverified against their underlying contracts, it claims.

The funds will help the company hire across product, engineering and go-to-market over the next 12 months and reinforce its New York base as it scales to work with institutional real estate customers across North America, Marc said.

The company works with customers across 30 US states and recently with some of the largest operators in Canada, with assets under management hitting $90bn. Its customer base includes the likes of Magnolia Capital, Birge & Held and multiple multi-state SEC-regulated organisations.

“We had already built a profitable business, but the scale of the opportunity we were seeing in North America made this the right time to accelerate,” said Devitt, the company’s CEO.

“Institutional owners are facing the same challenges across increasingly large and complex portfolios, and demand for a better way to understand and control operating costs is growing. This investment allows us to build our team and product capabilities in the US and, importantly, be closer to our customers from our new base in New York.” The company also operates out of Dublin.

Jonathan Lehr, the co-founder and general partner at Work-Bench added: “Institutional real estate is a huge market, but operating expenditure remains a major data blind spot for asset managers.

“Marc is solving a clear and costly problem for institutional owners, and the traction it is already seeing across North America demonstrates the strength of that demand. Over time, the value of this data will compound as Marc builds a hyperlocal database of multifamily operating expenses spanning markets across the country.”

The expansion follows the company’s initial success in the UK and Ireland, where its first property management product grew to more than 40,000 monthly logins, the company said.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.