MARC, the AI platform helping institutional real estate owners identify and control operating costs across their portfolios, has raised $5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round to accelerate its expansion across the US and Canada. Led by Work-Bench and MXV Capital, the round also includes a number of prominent technology founders and operators, including Mark Ghermazian of Braze, Des Traynor of Intercom, Ian Nolan of Brightflag, Cyrus Claffey of ButterflyMX, Daniel Eberhard of KOHO and Brian Moran, manager of professional golfer Shane Lowry.
The investment brings MARC’s total funding to $6 million and will support hires across product, engineering and go-to-market over the next 12 months, strengthening the company’s New York base as it scales its work with institutional real estate customers across North America.
Institutional operators managing tens of thousands of assets rely on disconnected Contract Management Systems (CMS), Accounts Payable (AP) platforms, and legacy workflows that were never designed to work together. The result is manual reconciliation, hidden billing errors, and recurring financial leakage at scale. MARC acts as the connective layer between these systems – continuously extracting contract terms, enforcing pricing and escalations, and validating invoices before payment, without human intervention
The company estimates that every $1 unnecessarily lost through operating expenditure can erase as much as $20 in underlying asset value, yet close to 100% of invoices received across the industry are currently unverified against their underlying contracts. For large institutional portfolios dealing with tens of thousands of invoices and lengthy agreements, checking every charge manually is effectively impossible.
MARC connects contracts, invoices and vendor data to help these institutional real estate asset managers understand and predict operating expenditure, identify overcharges and protect net operating income (NOI).
Today, the company works with customers across 30 US states and recently with some of the largest operators in Canada. MARC has quickly surpassed $100 million in annual vendor spend under management, with its customers representing a combined $90 billion in assets under management. Its customer base includes Magnolia Capital, Birge & Held and multiple multi-state SEC-regulated organisations, with MARC’s users also consisting of three of the ten largest property managers in the US.
Aaron Devitt, Founder and CEO of MARC, said: “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. 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 scale of the opportunity is already evident in MARC’s work with institutional customers. For Birge & Held, a US multifamily owner-operator overseeing more than $4 billion in assets across a 25,000-unit, 127-community portfolio, MARC reviewed 50,000+ invoice records from a single technology vendor against governing contract terms, identifying over 100 contract-backed overcharges and automating an estimated 4,333 hours of manual invoice-to-contract review in hours of deployment. Beyond identifying individual discrepancies, MARC is building a data layer across millions of invoices and thousands of contracts to help institutional owners understand and predict what services should cost across different assets and markets.
Jonathan Lehr, Co-Founder and General Partner at Work-Bench said: “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. That has the potential to become an important intelligence layer for the industry, supporting everything from property management and cost benchmarking to acquisition and investment decisions.”
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 and was adopted by some of Ireland’s largest property managers.
That experience highlighted a broader challenge for institutional owners. While sophisticated datasets exist to help large capital players understand the income side of an asset, operating expenditure remains fragmented and often dependent on regional expertise, particularly when expanding into new markets. MARC exists to unlock the millions of data points in siloed finance systems to give asset managers the ability to assess an asset anywhere in North America and understand what individual services should cost, helping them make better decisions before acquisition and reduce costly stabilisation periods after entering new markets.
About MARC
MARC is an AI platform for institutional real estate owners and operators, connecting contracts, invoices and vendor data to help asset managers better understand and control operating expenditure. Headquartered in New York with operations in Dublin, MARC works with customers across the US and Canada representing a combined $90 billion in assets under management and more than $100 million in annual vendor spend.
MARC was founded by 24-year-old Aaron Devitt, who previously built the company’s first property management product for the UK and Irish markets, growing it to more than 40,000 monthly logins and securing adoption among some of Ireland’s largest property managers. As Founder and CEO, Devitt now leads MARC’s expansion across North America.
