MARC, an Irish-founded, New York-based AI platform that helps institutional real estate owners control operating costs, has raised $5 million (€4.5 million) in an oversubscribed seed round led by Work-Bench and MXV Capital. The round matters to the sector because it funds automated checking of invoices against contracts, a check that the company says almost no invoices in the industry currently receive.

The round brings total funding to $6 million (€5.3 million) and will support hires across product, engineering and go-to-market over the next 12 months, strengthening MARC’s New York base as it scales across the US and Canada. Started by Aaron Devitt while he was studying marketing in Dublin, the company first built software for the UK and Irish rental markets.

Institutional operators managing tens of thousands of assets rely on disconnected contract management systems, accounts payable platforms and legacy workflows, which leads to manual reconciliation, hidden billing errors and recurring financial leakage. MARC extracts contract terms, enforces pricing and escalations and validates invoices before payment.

MARC works with customers across 30 US states and some of the largest operators in Canada, manages more than $100 million (€89 million) in annual vendor spend, and counts customers representing a combined $90 billion (€80 billion) in assets under management.

In results reported by MARC, for Birge & Held, a US multifamily owner-operator with more than $4 billion (€3.6 billion) in assets, MARC reviewed more than 50,000 invoice records from one technology vendor, identified over 100 contract-backed overcharges and automated an estimated 4,333 hours of manual review.

Aaron Devitt, Founder and CEO of MARC, said: “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.”

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.”

The structural driver is fragmented operating expense data, with contracts, invoices and vendor records held in separate systems, which MARC aims to consolidate into a hyperlocal database of multifamily operating costs.

For the sector, the round shows investors backing AI tools that automate contract-to-invoice verification as institutional owners seek tighter control of operating costs.

Source: irishtechnews.ie / wise.com / workbench.substack.com