Piotr and I just put $1M of our own money into our own project.
Open Mercato closes its first funding round: $1M, straight from our pockets.
Why our own money?
We spent 20 years building companies on open source. Divante (exit, EV ~$65M). Callstack (exit, EV ~$125M). Vue Storefront / Alokai (Series A, $40M). We know this game. And we see the next tornado we have been waiting for: AI-Engineering.
Investors keep knocking. We politely decline. Own capital means zero board pressure and full freedom to experiment. In AI, tectonic shifts happen overnight - OpenAI or Anthropic can ship your whole startup as a feature. We want room to play the long game.
The idea is 10 years old
We first sketched a framework for B2B business apps back in 2016. We were deep in e-commerce then, so we built Open Loyalty instead. The framework went into a drawer. AI coding agents pulled it back out. Piotr wrote the first line of code in September 2025. I joined in January 2026.
Two numbers from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025
- 84% of developers already use AI tools
- 66% spend more time fixing "almost correct" AI-generated code
Code written by AI needs a foundation. Open Mercato gives agents a ready architecture, specifications and domain modules. It gives humans tools to build with AI consistently and safely, as one team. We call this category: AI-Engineering Foundation Framework.
Here is one more thing I found while doing research. The last independent ERPs that stuck - Odoo, ERPNext, Apache OFBiz - started 20-25 years ago. Since then, no new ERP has caught on. AI just reopened that window. You can now build the thousands of features an ERP needs at a completely different speed.
Traction after a few months
- 1,600+ stars on GitHub, 130+ contributors
- 27 certified partner agencies running client implementations
- inbound inquiries growing every month - from 40 in May to 90 in July
- hundreds of thousands of dollars in our first signed deals.
The biggest production deployment runs at a maritime freight company. They sell software to their clients, with Open Mercato at its core. It has been live for months. Most of our partners are Polish agencies with clients worldwide. From September we start recruiting partners in the US and UK.
Four founders
Maciej Gren and Patryk Lewczuk join the Founding Team. Maciej takes business development and the partner program. Patryk takes product and implementations. Both receive equity through our ESOP and become our partners.
We met them through open source. Patryk was a beta reader of my book (The 5) and started contributing as a volunteer. Maciej worked with us briefly at Divante and came back with ideas and code. We watched two highly motivated people do great work long before anyone paid them. Best recruitment process I know.
The whole company works this way. Oliwia Zielinska won one of our hackathons and now leads product design. Every feature ships through her. Meritocracy scales better than hierarchy in a 10-person core team with 100+ contributors.
Where the money goes
- Core product - making AI-Engineering easier to adopt for companies
- Agentic Orchestrator and products like Cezar, born from the internal practices we use to build Open Mercato
- Partner network expansion
What success looks like
You can generate a whole app with AI in a weekend. Then you hit reality. When can you edit an order line? What if there was a payment? A return? Business software is thousands of edge cases. Every month of experience from partners and contributors deepens that moat.
Our focus this year is simple: successful first implementations. Our engineers work directly with partners and clients to make them succeed. At Divante, clients from 2010 stayed with us long after the exit. We want to build Open Mercato the same way - for decades.
One more thing. Around 7,000 people watched the premiere of our AI-Engineering training, built with Brave. This topic is simply exploding.
Start with 80% done. Check the code on GitHub or book a demo at openmercato.com.