Investors

AI is turning labor into software.

The recurring work businesses used to hire for, or buy tools to attempt, is becoming an operated system: AI underneath, human judgment at the edges. Markster starts with the revenue work owner-led service firms cannot staff reliably.

Backed by 500 Global

The thesis is here. Traction, financials, and round terms come in the conversation.

For prospective investors
What you need to believe

Five things have to be true.

01
Service firms need recurring revenue work to run every week: research, lists, outreach, content, CRM follow-up, and reporting.
02
Most owner-led firms cannot staff that work well, so it stays dependent on the one person holding it together.
03
SaaS sold them access to tools, not execution of the work, and left the operating burden on the owner.
04
AI can now carry far more of that work, but only when it is wrapped in context, approvals, QA, and evidence.
05
Revenue is the right first wedge, because the pain is visible and the budget already exists.
Why now

The shift is documented, not hoped for.

Four independent signals point the same way: the budget and the buyer behavior are already here, and the operated version of the work is the gap.

"Services are the new software."
The category we operate in, named by the firm that names categories: selling the finished work, made more autonomous, not another tool to run.
15.3% of budget goes to AI. Only 30% can scale it.
The money is already committed. The ability to operate it is exactly the gap Markster fills.
69% of B2B buyers validate AI with a human.
AI underneath, a person accountable: exactly the operated model buyers reach for, not an autonomous bot.
Agencies are failing marketers' AI needs.
The incumbents cannot deliver the operated version, which is why the wedge is open now.
What Markster is

An autopilot for revenue work, not another tool.

A small team and AI operate the recurring revenue work in the customer's voice. The owner approves the plan, the voice, and the sequences; new plays always come to them first; approved work then runs on its own, and they can steer or veto anything, anytime. ScaleOS, our operating method, baselines each business and re-scores it every month, so delivery stays repeatable instead of bespoke.

For twenty years, growing meant assembling parts: a salesperson, an agency, a CRM, a content contractor, another outbound tool, and hoping someone inside the company had time to make it all work. None of it becomes a revenue function on its own. Markster sells the function, not the parts.

The Revenue Engine is the work it runs, end to end

01

Direction, offer, and market research

02

Lists and contact data

03

Sending infrastructure and deliverability

04

Outbound and reply handling

05

Website and conversion assets

06

CRM and pipeline operations

07

Content, SEO, AI visibility, and creative

08

Reporting and control

The category

Copilots sell tools. Autopilots sell the work.

The owner approves the plan, the voice, and the plays. Approved work then runs on autopilot, operated by a team and AI. The work is the product, not a dashboard nobody has time to run.

Talk to the founders
How it runs

AI-operated work is credible because of the loop, not the model.

Markster maps the business, turns the map into recurring workflows, runs the approved work, records what happened, and improves from the evidence.

source

Source map

What the business is, who it serves, how it speaks, and what it can prove.

workflow

Workflow map

The recurring jobs the Revenue Engine runs each week.

approval

Approval map

What the owner approves, and how changes escalate.

evidence

Evidence map

What was researched, sent, published, followed up, and measured.

review

Review map

Weekly reporting and monthly reassessment feed the next cycle.

Why revenue first

The buyer feels this pain without a category lecture.

These are not abstract AI-governance problems. They are ordinary business problems. Run that loop repeatedly, and the company earns the right to operate more workflows.

The list is thin.
The message is generic.
The CRM is stale.
Follow-up depends on memory.
Content happens in bursts.
Reports do not explain what changed.
Nobody owns the whole loop.
Revenue stays dependent on one person.
How to compare it

What each model leaves unsolved.

Each of these is genuinely useful. The difference is what the customer is still left to run.

ModelWhat the customer buysWhat remains unsolved
AgencyExpertise and campaign laborThe work often sits outside the customer's operating rhythm.
SaaSAccess to softwareSomeone inside the company still has to run it.
AI toolNew capabilityThe customer still needs context, QA, approvals, and workflow design.
Fractional hireTime and experienceCapacity is still tied to people.
MarksterOperated recurring revenue workThe company must prove repeatability, margin, and focus.
What could make this wrong

The serious objections, and the shape of our answers.

The full answers come in the conversation, with customer evidence and operating data. But you should know we have already stress-tested each one.

DIYAI tools may get easy enough that owners run this themselves.The constraint was never tooling; it is operating attention. Accounting software did not end bookkeepers, it ended bookkeeping as the owner's job.
VerticalVertical software companies may absorb parts of the workflow.They can absorb tasks; they cannot absorb accountability for the whole loop. Where verticalization wins, we operate inside those tools rather than compete.
HorizontalHorizontal platforms may commoditize the simple automation.We expect it, and it helps: cheaper automation lowers our delivery cost while the customer still buys the operated outcome. Our margin depends on the loop, not on proprietary automation.
Services dragThe service component may stay too heavy to reach software economics.This is the central diligence question, and the one ScaleOS exists to answer. The trajectory of human hours per account is the number to underwrite.
ApprovalApproval steps may slow the felt sense of progress.Approval is the product, not the tax; it is exactly what 69% of B2B buyers say they want from AI. We design the queue so the owner's Monday takes minutes.
FocusThe wedge may require sharper vertical focus than a broad message suggests.Agreed, and the operating data tells us where: workflow recipes reveal which verticals repeat fastest.

What compounds if we are right: workflow recipes, client source and voice maps, approval and QA history, delivery and review infrastructure, integration knowledge, and operating memory across similar businesses. These are the assets that turn a managed service into a durable company.

Proof

The thesis, already true for one business.

Markster operates the revenue work for an owner-led agency. Its results are a matter of public record. In the year we have operated it, net revenue roughly tripled, while the company’s headcount stayed at one.

Year 1 baseline
Year 2 6.2×net revenue
Year 3 ≈17×the operated year

Net-revenue growth vs the Year 1 baseline, verified against public company filings.

1
The company still runs on a headcount of one. Revenue tripled without adding a single hire — the whole point of operating the work as software instead of staffing it.

“Markster does market research and proposals while I sleep. My team didn’t grow, my system did.”

Founder & CEO of an agency we operate for

One business is not a pattern; it is the existence proof for the thesis on this page. The number to underwrite is human hours per unit of revenue, and in the year we operated it, it bent the right way. The rest of the operating data comes in the conversation.

The team

Two operators who have run the work and built the machine.

Ivan Ivanka
Founder & CEO
Fifteen years running growth at every scale, from the shop floor to Chief Growth Officer of Helmes, a 1,500-person European software firm. He worked at Deutsche Telekom, counted Vodafone among his clients, and built and exited four agencies before Markster. The failure mode was identical at every scale: the business stalls when sales, marketing, and follow-up still run through one person. He built ScaleOS and Markster to remove that bottleneck.
Attila Sukosd
Co-Founder & CTO
Ex-Airtame, shipping hardware and software into Tesla and Netflix. He builds the invisible machinery, the sending infrastructure, deliverability, CRM operations, and agent orchestration, so a customer only ever sees finished work queued for approval. It is what lets one small team operate many businesses.

Lean and AI-native. The people who built it run it: no account managers between the customer and the work. Backed by 500 Global.

The ask

If this is the thesis you want to underwrite, talk to the founders.

Markster starts with Revenue Engine because the buyer pain is concrete. The larger question is whether AI-operated workflows become the next form of business software for service companies. We are speaking with a small number of investors about that thesis. If it is one you would want to underwrite, the conversation takes thirty minutes.