AI start-up Marc has raised $5m in a seed funding round to accelerate its North American expansion across the US and Canada. Marc’s total funding has reached $6m following $1m being raised earlier this year in February. During this round, the company was backed by 23 angel investors including Wayflyer’s Jack Pierse, Hostelworld’s Tom Kennedy and SoftCo’s Susan Spence.
The most recent round was led by Work-Bench and MXV Capital. Other investors comprise – Mark Ghermezian, the Co-Founder of customer engagement platform Braze, Des Traynor, and Brightflag’s Co-Founder Ian Nolan.
Marc was founded by Technological University Dublin graduate Aaron Devitt. The platform uses AI to analyse fragmented sources of vendor contract and invoice data regarding property units designed to assist managers with identifying discrepancies which can cause overpayment.
According to Marc, with large institutional portfolios who deal with a large volume of invoices and lengthy agreements, checking them manually effectively would be impossible.
The funds will be used for company hires across product, engineering and go-to-market in the next year. Marc will seek to reinforce its New York base amid working with institutional real estate customers in North America.
“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.”
Aaron Devitt, CEO and Founder, Marc
According to the company, they work with customers across 30 US states and operators in Canada. In addition, its customer base includes Magnolia Capital, Birge & Held and multiple multi-state SEC-regulated organisations. The company also operates out of Dublin.
“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.”
Jonathan Lehr, Co-Founder and General Partner, Work-Bench
Marc’s expansion follows its ‘initial success in the UK and Ireland’ where its first property management product grew to over 40,000 monthly logins.
