MARC, an AI-powered real estate spend intelligence platform, has raised $5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round to accelerate its expansion across the United States and Canada. The round was led by Work-Bench and MXV Capital, with participation from technology founders and operators associated with companies including Braze, Intercom, Brightflag, ButterflyMX and KOHO.

The investment brings MARC's total funding to $6 million. The company plans to use the capital over the next 12 months to hire across product, engineering and go-to-market functions, strengthen its New York headquarters and expand its relationships with institutional real estate owners and operators.

MARC helps property owners identify unnecessary operating expenses by connecting contracts, invoices and vendor data. Its platform is designed to detect billing errors, verify charges against contractual terms and give asset managers better visibility into the costs associated with managing large property portfolios.

The company says its customers collectively represent $90 billion in assets under management, while annual vendor spend under its platform has surpassed $100 million.

What Does MARC Do?

Institutional real estate owners manage portfolios containing thousands or even tens of thousands of properties and assets. Their financial operations often depend on multiple disconnected systems, including contract management software, accounts payable platforms and legacy workflows.

These systems may store relevant information separately, making it difficult to verify whether vendor invoices match the prices, terms and escalation clauses agreed upon in contracts.

MARC aims to address this challenge through an AI-powered platform that connects these sources of information.

The platform extracts contractual terms, checks pricing and scheduled increases, and validates invoices against the corresponding agreements before payment. By automating these processes, MARC aims to reduce manual reconciliation and identify expenses that may otherwise go unnoticed.

For example, a property management company may receive recurring invoices for maintenance, technology, utilities or other services across multiple locations. If a supplier charges an incorrect rate or applies an increase that does not match the contract, identifying the discrepancy manually across a large portfolio can be time-consuming.

MARC is designed to compare the invoice with the governing contract and flag discrepancies for review.

The company's broader ambition extends beyond identifying individual billing errors. By connecting information across contracts, vendors, invoices and properties, it aims to build a data layer that helps real estate asset managers understand what services should cost across different locations and markets.

Why Operating Expenses Matter in Real Estate

Operating expenditure directly affects the financial performance of income-producing real estate assets.

For institutional investors and property managers, even relatively small errors in recurring expenses can accumulate across large portfolios. Incorrect billing, outdated contract terms and inconsistent pricing can reduce profitability when they go undetected.

MARC estimates that every $1 unnecessarily lost through operating expenditure can erase as much as $20 in underlying asset value. The company also states that nearly 100% of invoices received across the industry are not verified against their underlying contracts.

These figures are estimates cited in the company's announcement, rather than independently established industry-wide measurements.

The underlying challenge is straightforward: large property portfolios generate substantial amounts of financial documentation, but checking every invoice against a lengthy contract manually is difficult to sustain.

MARC seeks to make that verification process more systematic by automating the comparison between contractual obligations and actual charges.

The platform also aims to help asset managers predict operating expenses more accurately, supporting decisions about budgets, property performance and investment opportunities.

MARC's Growth and Customer Traction

MARC reports that it now works with customers across 30 US states and has recently expanded its customer relationships in Canada.

The platform has surpassed $100 million in annual vendor spend under management, with customers representing a combined $90 billion in assets under management.

Its customers include Magnolia Capital, Birge & Held and multiple multi-state organisations regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company also says its users include three of the ten largest property managers in the United States.

These figures suggest that MARC is targeting institutional operators with complex portfolios rather than focusing exclusively on smaller property owners.

The company previously established a presence in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where its initial property management product grew to more than 40,000 monthly logins and was adopted by some of Ireland's largest property managers.

That experience helped reveal a broader opportunity in institutional real estate: while investors have access to sophisticated datasets for analysing rental income and asset performance, operating expenses often remain fragmented across systems and markets.

MARC is attempting to address that information gap by making expenditure data more accessible and comparable.

How MARC Helped Birge & Held Identify Overcharges

One example highlighted by the company involves Birge & Held, a US multifamily property owner and operator overseeing more than $4 billion in assets.

Its portfolio includes approximately 25,000 residential units across 127 communities.

According to MARC, the platform reviewed more than 50,000 invoice records from a single technology vendor against the relevant contractual terms. The review identified over 100 contract-backed overcharges.

MARC also estimates that the automated review saved approximately 4,333 hours of manual invoice-to-contract checking, with the work completed within hours of deployment.

The example illustrates the potential value of automating a process that would otherwise require substantial manual effort.

For an operator managing a large portfolio, finding multiple billing discrepancies can improve cost visibility and help ensure that payments reflect agreed contractual terms.

However, the results described are a company-reported customer example. They do not, on their own, establish that every deployment will produce comparable savings or identify the same number of discrepancies.

MARC's longer-term goal is to build a broader dataset across millions of invoices and thousands of contracts, enabling institutional owners to compare service costs across properties and geographic markets.

Who Is Behind MARC?

MARC was founded by Aaron Devitt, who serves as chief executive officer.

Devitt previously built the company's initial property management product for the UK and Irish markets. That product grew to more than 40,000 monthly logins and gained adoption among major Irish property managers.

With the company's expansion into North America, Devitt is focusing on the financial and operational challenges faced by institutional real estate owners.

The latest funding round was led by Work-Bench and MXV Capital. Other participating investors and operators include 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.

Work-Bench co-founder and general partner Jonathan Lehr said institutional real estate operating expenditure remains a significant data blind spot for asset managers.

He also highlighted the potential for MARC to build a detailed database of multifamily operating expenses across different markets. Such information could eventually support property management, cost benchmarking, acquisitions and investment decisions.

Why MARC Is Expanding Across North America

MARC's expansion follows its initial success in the UK and Ireland. The company now aims to help institutional owners understand operating expenses across a much larger and more geographically diverse real estate market.

Operating costs can vary between cities, regions, property types and service providers. When investors acquire properties in unfamiliar markets, limited cost visibility can make it harder to estimate expenses accurately and assess the financial performance of an asset.

MARC wants to use information from contracts and invoices to help asset managers understand what particular services should cost in different locations.

This could be useful before an acquisition, when investors evaluate expected operating expenses, as well as after a purchase, when property managers work to stabilise performance and control costs.

The company believes that aggregating information across many properties will make its dataset increasingly valuable as additional customers and transactions are added.

The planned North American expansion will strengthen its presence in the United States and Canada while bringing the company closer to institutional customers.

How MARC Plans to Use the $5 Million

The seed funding will support hiring across three main areas over the next 12 months:

• Product development to improve its real estate spend intelligence platform.

• Engineering to strengthen its technology and automation capabilities.

• Go-to-market operations to support customer acquisition and expansion.

The investment brings MARC's total funding to $6 million and gives the company additional resources to scale its commercial operations.

MARC had already built a profitable business, according to Devitt, who said the scale of the North American opportunity made this the right time to accelerate expansion.

The company's next phase will depend on its ability to convert its existing traction into broader adoption, demonstrate consistent financial benefits for customers and build a reliable dataset across more properties and markets.

Conclusion

MARC's $5 million seed round, led by Work-Bench and MXV Capital, highlights the growing role of AI in real estate financial operations.

By connecting contracts, invoices and vendor information, the platform aims to help institutional owners identify overcharges, control operating expenses and make better-informed investment decisions.

With more than $100 million in annual vendor spend under management and customers representing $90 billion in assets, MARC is building on early traction as it expands across North America.

Its longer-term opportunity lies in turning fragmented expenditure records into useful market intelligence that helps property owners understand not only what they are spending, but what they should be paying.