US Landlords Fund MARC’s $1m Fight With Overbilling

Dublin proptech MARC raised $1m in February 2026 from 23 angel investors, with no venture firm in the round. US multifamily executives joined that cap table because vendor bills and signed contracts still live in different systems.

Irish tech names made the headlines. The landlords who write the invoices made the bet.

The Multifamily Executives on the Cap Table

The company said the pre-seed closed with no venture capital. Backers included Wayflyer co-founder Jack Pierse, Hostelworld’s Tom Kennedy, SoftCo’s Susan Spence, Dublin Chamber of Commerce’s Eoghan Quigley and Unmind’s James McGann, plus institutional real estate investors and US-based multifamily executives.

Those last two groups rarely turn up in an Irish angel story, and they are the ones who feel a missed renewal in net operating income. Halo Business Angel Network said it supported the round and put the $1m at about €840k.

HBAN is proud to support MARC on its $1M pre-seed, backed by 20+ angels.

From 40-unit Irish managers to 25,000-unit US owners in under a year, serious ambition in action. Huge congrats to founder Aaron Devitt & team.
Read more via @thinkbusinessie: https://t.co/bVh6kw4OEf pic.twitter.com/hL28ROiWRm

— HBAN (@HBANIreland) February 10, 2026

Pierse treated the cheque as a vote for an Irish company that had already crossed the Atlantic, not as a campus prize.

Backing founders like Aaron is how we continue to build Ireland’s next generation of global technology companies. MARC is tackling a deeply entrenched problem in real estate with an AI native approach and the early traction in the United States speaks for itself.

Jack Pierse, co-founder, Wayflyer

The US operators in the round did not need that speech. They already run the portfolios where a landscaping contract, a waste haulage deal and a cleaning rate card sit in email while accounts payable pays the bill.

What the $1m Is Underwriting

MARC’s product site, aimed at large real estate owners, lists combined customer assets of $67bn and more than $100m of contracted spend under watch, with 24/7 contract-agent monitoring. That is the book the $1m is meant to sit against.

MARC’S SCALE CLAIMS

• Customer assets: Combined AUM of $67bn on the product site.
• Vendor spend: More than $100m of contracted spend exposure.
• US operators: Clients in more than 20 US states, each managing between 5,000 and 35,000 homes.
• Starting point: Irish managers handling about 40 units after the 2024 launch.

NDRC, Ireland’s national startup accelerator at Dogpatch Labs, said founder Aaron Devitt validated the problem in its Pre-Accelerator, built with customers in the Accelerator, and was live with US operators managing 25,000 units after the $1m close. HBAN used the same 25,000-unit line for US owners.

MARC founder Aaron Devitt validated a real operational problem in NDRC’s Pre-Accelerator, built with customers in the NDRC Accelerator, and is now live with US operators managing 25,000 units after raising a $1M pre-seed round. More via @tech_eu: https://t.co/QTD06oRl3l pic.twitter.com/TI1Y9duwP4

— NDRC (@NDRC_hq) February 12, 2026

In February 2026 the company said revenue had risen tenfold in four weeks and the team had tripled, and that it was hiring engineers for North American delivery. After landing Irish lettings groups including Sherry Fitzgerald Lettings and DNG Lettings in 2025, it had moved to owners in the United States and Canada. The $1m was earmarked for product work and that expansion.

A Week Without Heat, Then a Different Product

Devitt was 22 when he founded MARC in 2024 and deferred a marketing course at Technological University Dublin to do it. The first version of the product was not an accounts tool.

FROM A COLD FLAT TO A PRE-SEED

1. December 2022: His mother and siblings go more than a week without heat after faults that property management is slow to answer.
2. Early 2023: He interviews more than 70 other tenants, then property managers, and hears the same back-and-forth between residents, contractors and agents.
3. September 2023: He meets developer Sagar Kale on Y Combinator’s co-founder matching platform; Kale has worked since 2019 at a UK proptech firm.
4. April 2024: MARC wins the Irish Student Entrepreneurship Forum grand final, taking €10,000 and the Irish Student Entrepreneur of the Year title. The pitch is an “estate agent in tenants’ pockets,” an AI layer that qualifies tenant queries and scrapes manuals for answers.
5. 2025: Paying Irish lettings managers come on, then North American owners.
6. February 10, 2026: A $1m angel round closes with 23 backers and no venture firm.

By the raise, the live product was a contract agent that reads vendor files in inboxes and SharePoint, pulls fees, renewal dates and termination rights, and checks them against invoices. Devitt has said accounts payable and contract systems are usually disconnected, and that the gap causes continuous overbilling at scale, adding up to many millions of dollars for larger residential portfolios.

“Our goal is to give property operators instant access to the contract data that affects asset values,” he said. Manual review that can take months, he added, drops to seconds once the files are structured.

8.6% of Contract Value Walks Out the Door

World Commerce & Contracting’s August 2025 research puts average value erosion of 8.6% on poor contract management. Invoicing errors sit in that pile, next to overruns, missed entitlements and fights over scope.

WORLDCC CONTRACT FAILURE STATS

A survey of 325 property managers in the United States, run by the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation with SurfaceAI, found 60% hit financial discrepancies every month and the other 40% every quarter. Every respondent named billing errors as the leading source, from bad rent charges and amenity fees to duplicate invoices.

Jason Wallis, chief executive of SurfaceAI, said the results show a systemic issue, not an occasional slip, and that old reconciliation habits cost time, money and trust. Ashkan Zandieh, managing director at CRETI, said the next tools have to stop errors before they post, rather than clean them up later. The same note warned that tenant chatbots, widely bought in property management, do not catch billing mistakes.

PINCH’s September 17, 2025 review of multifamily janitorial spend is a clean specimen of the leak. Of 14,866 turnover cleaning line items, 29.1% carried an up-charge, at $78.77 per job on average. Top 50 NMHC portfolios saw fewer up-charges (19.86%) at a higher ticket ($92.08). Smaller operators saw them more often (41.12%) at $69.91. Only 59.67% of invoice lines had full unit, type and date detail, which is how a rate card and a payment file drift apart.

How MARC Ties an Invoice to the Signed Page

MARC describes itself as the layer between systems that store agreements and systems that pay bills. Agents locate contracts, extract terms and keep a live file that teams can query, then flag invoices that do not match the signed rate or hours.

WHAT THE AGENTS WATCH

• Renewals: End dates, windows and opt-out periods, so a service deal does not roll forward unseen.
• Risk alerts: Unsigned agreements and hidden fees, raised before they become a payables problem.
• Benchmarking: Pricing gaps and overlapping vendor services across a portfolio.
• Maintenance bills: Invoices that exceed agreed rates or labour hours, marked for rejection.
• Warranties: Repairs still covered, flagged before a work order goes out.
• Vendor compliance: Insurance and certifications checked before a crew is sent on site.

That list is why a multifamily executive writes a personal cheque when a venture firm might not. Leasing AI is a visible resident product. Contract-to-invoice matching is a control on OpEx, and it only pays if the recoveries clear the subscription. Devitt’s pitch is that contract data moves asset values when you manage thousands of units, and that most teams still cannot open that data quickly.

Dogpatch Labs, 23 Angels, Zero Venture Firms

MARC is based at Dogpatch Labs in Dublin and sells into owners in North America from that room. Skipping venture capital kept the first institutional conversation inside a group that already knows the invoice file: Irish operators who have scaled companies, plus the US executives who will either become customers or already are.

The public trail on X after the close was thin, a pair of official notes from HBAN and NDRC and little else, which is what a back-office finance product looks like from the outside. The argument sits in asset-management meetings, where a silent auto-renew and a padded cleaning line never trend.

MARC’s site puts more than $100m of contracted spend under that watch, funded by a $1m round that venture firms sat out. The landlords on the cap table already know what a missed clause costs them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does MARC Replace Property-Management Software?

No. The company positions the product as an intelligence layer that reads existing document stores and checks invoices against those terms, sitting beside a property-management system and an accounts-payable stack rather than replacing leasing, rent collection or work-order dispatch.

What Security Claims Does MARC Make for Portfolio Data?

The product site says portfolio files are covered by bank-grade encryption, strict role-based access and continuous compliance monitoring, language aimed at risk-averse owners who will not put vendor contracts into a new tool without those controls.

How Many Contract Teams Think Their Agreements Work?

WorldCC found that only 39% of commercial practitioners believe their contracts are effective at delivering the intended outcome, and only 16% believe negotiations even focus on the right topics, which is the human backdrop to an AI pass over fees and renewals.

Which Markets Does MARC Name on Its Site?

The company says it is trusted by institutional portfolios across the United States, Canada and Europe, a wider map than the February 2026 funding notes, which talked about Ireland plus the US and Canadian expansion the $1m was meant to fund.