MARC raises $5m seed to check real estate invoices against contracts

MARC raises $5m seed to check real estate invoices against contracts

22 October 2026: MARC, a spend intelligence platform for institutional real estate, has raised a $5 million seed round led by Work-Bench with MXV Capital. Jonathan Lehr of Work-Bench announced the investment. The product turns vendor contracts, invoices and operating records into data an owner can act on, and checks each invoice against what the contract actually allows.

Not yet independently verified. This rests on the lead investor's own post, not on MARC. The spend, customer and invoice figures and the profitability claim are as that post states them, and we have not seen MARC's own announcement or its accounts. The post does not name MARC's headquarters, so we do not give one. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The gap in accounts payable

Lehr's argument is that property owners have spent heavily on technology for revenue but little on operating costs. Accounts payable systems usually match an invoice to a purchase order or a budget, not to the contract behind it. His example is a vendor that raises a bill by 5 percent when the contract permits 3 percent; the invoice is paid automatically anyway. A multifamily operator with 25,000 units, he notes, might hold thousands of vendor contracts.

He adds that at a 5 percent cap rate, every dollar of recurring operating expense removed adds $20 of property value, which is why owners under pressure from interest rates, insurance and labour costs are looking at costs.

Contracts as code

MARC's approach, in the post's words, is "contracts as code": it converts pricing, escalators, renewals and obligations into structured data that AI agents can use. The post lists three capabilities. Contract intelligence gives a searchable view of vendor relationships and renewals. Diligence tooling analyses thousands of documents in hours during acquisitions and disposals. Autonomous invoice validation compares invoices with contract terms and flags overcharges.

Lehr also sees a longer-term prospect: an anonymised dataset of operating costs across properties, vendors and regions, built only from customers who opt in, which he compares to the role CoStar plays in real estate data.

The traction Work-Bench reports

The post says MARC manages more than $100 million of annual vendor spend across 30 US states and Canada, and that its customers represent about $90 billion in assets under management. Named customers are Magnolia Capital and Birge & Held, alongside some of the largest institutional operators in North America. It says MARC was profitable before this round.

One case is given. For Birge & Held, which runs about 25,000 multifamily units, MARC analysed more than 50,000 invoice records from a single technology vendor and found over 100 overcharges backed by the contract.

The founder

Aaron Devitt, 24, is founder and chief executive. The post says his first product, software linking tenants and property managers, reached more than 40,000 monthly logins in the UK and Ireland before he moved into North America. MARC is hiring a head of engineering. Our contract management software category lists 8 products and our accounts payable software category 6, for teams that want to compare approaches.

Company profile on TrustList: MARC

Sources

• Work-Bench: Announcing our investment in MARC (post by Jonathan Lehr), 22 October 2026