The most economically significant industry that still runs on paperwork
The global technology channel, the interconnected web of managed service providers, software vendors, and distributors that delivers technology to virtually every business on earth, moves $6.07 trillion in annual revenue (Omdia, Jan 2026). It underpins the digital infrastructure of every modern economy, and it runs on manufactured friction.
An MSP handling relationships with thirty vendors logs into thirty separate portals, fills in thirty different deal-registration forms, chases thirty approval queues, and reconciles thirty funding programmes, all manually, all repeatedly, with no shared intelligence between any of them. The average deal registration consumes 27 minutes of skilled human time. The majority of qualifying deals are never registered at all, because the friction cost exceeds the perceived benefit. The clearest single-sourced proxy for the value this destroys: up to 60% of Market Development Funds go unused every quarter (ZINFI).
Nobody builds a startup to fix this. It is too unglamorous, too operational, too deep inside the plumbing of an industry outsiders find impenetrable. That is exactly why it has stayed broken, and why fixing it at the infrastructure level, rather than the workflow level, creates a platform position that is very hard to challenge.
Three forces are converging into a narrow window
Channel plumbing has been broken for thirty years. What makes this moment different from every prior attempt at reform is that three independent technologies are maturing at the same time. You only see that convergence from inside the channel.
AI agents are entering vendor PRMs
Salesforce Agentforce, Microsoft Copilot for Sales, and their successors are embedding AI agents directly inside partner-management systems. They can query the vendor's own CRM, but they have no permissioned path to partner data. They are expensive systems reasoning over structurally incomplete information.
Cryptographic trust is production-ready
Zero-knowledge proofs now allow verified claims to be shared without exposing the underlying data. A partner can prove revenue above a threshold without revealing the figure; competing vendors can participate in shared intelligence without seeing each other's data. A multi-party trust layer no longer requires a surveillance platform.
Agent-to-agent protocols are standardising
Model Context Protocol and its peers are creating the technical preconditions for AI agents to transact autonomously across organisational boundaries. The entity that controls the permissioned trust layer for those transactions will hold a category position that is very hard to dislodge.
Enter through the workflow. Build the infrastructure.
Every existing solution is built for one side of the relationship: vendor portal tools for vendors, PSA platforms for MSPs, PRM systems for programme management. Nobody has built the neutral layer in the middle: the platform that serves the MSP navigating all of them at once, captures the verified intelligence their transactions generate, and makes it available to the AI agents now being deployed across the ecosystem.
indyrct is building Cotillion, the channel operating system. The entry point is deliberately simple: deal-registration automation: 27 minutes reduced to 2, multi-vendor simultaneous submission, integrated directly into the MSP's existing Autotask or ConnectWise workflow. No vendor behaviour change required. Adopted for pure self-interest.
But every deal that flows through Cotillion creates a verified, cryptographically anchored data point. Across hundreds of MSPs and thousands of deals, those points accumulate into something that has never existed: a verified performance record, at the partner level, owned by no single vendor, and trustworthy to any AI agent that queries it. Reported data is an assertion. Verified data is a cryptographically anchored claim. The automation is what MSPs adopt. The verified data it generates is what Cotillion is really building.
Two assets that compound where workflow tools cannot
Verified data has commercial utility long before the full platform vision unlocks. Two structural positions turn a workflow tool into infrastructure.
The Partner Attribution Index
A partner doing identical work across thirty vendor relationships today generates thirty different scores: none portable, none verified, none comparable. The PAI is the vendor-neutral substrate that makes both sides measurable: one verified record, four monetisable views. The MSP gets a defensible engagement receipt; the vendor gets verified partner intelligence in place of self-reported claims; the distributor gets portfolio benchmarking; the procurement buyer gets execution evidence.
The Agent Exchange
The telephone exchange for AI. A vendor's Agentforce agent cannot reach into an MSP's Autotask directly. It routes its request through the Agent Exchange, which authenticates both parties, presents the scoped permission request to the MSP, proxies the query, and logs the interaction cryptographically. Access is priced at the connection layer, the same model that made Plaid, Twilio, and Stripe infrastructure companies rather than software companies.
Each horizon is unlocked by the layer beneath it
Cotillion is an infrastructure stack, not a roadmap stitched together from feature releases. Each horizon is unlocked, and made defensible, by the one below. The wedge generates the data; the data generates the moat; the moat creates the category. Each stage has standalone commercial value and contributes an irreplaceable component to the next.
The Cotillion Stack
Read the full infrastructure stack bottom-up, where conviction is built today, and top-down, where the value accrues.
Sized bottom-up from confirmed unit economics
Most pre-seed decks present a single blended TAM that conflates distinct buyers into one number no investor believes. Cotillion is sized differently. The same product, deployed across four horizons, unlocks three distinct paying ICPs that don't monetise on the same clock. Every figure is built as unit count × price, confirmed where earned and labelled a hypothesis where not, walkable line by line.
The confirmed MSP and vendor markets give a global SAM of $1,080M–$3,030M AUD. MSPs carry essentially all confirmed revenue today at $100–150 AUD per vendor connection per month (founding/list; ~$500/month at typical vendor counts); vendors become a modelled revenue line at $2,500 AUD/month per integration once H2 ships (hypothesis pricing); distributors are a named future horizon, disclosed with pricing yet to be defined rather than padded into the base case.
The ICP Progression & Market Sizing
The full bottom-up TAM / SAM / SOM build across all three ICPs, with confirmed pricing and the ANZ beachhead.
The vision does not wait for a Series A to begin funding itself
Partner Compass is indyrct's near-term commercial engine and the pre-close revenue bridge, front-loaded by design: a $3,500 Vendor Program Diagnostic followed by a $1,500/month Fractional Vendor Manager engagement, capped at six Founding Partners. It is Vendor Manager as a Service (VMaaS), sold to vendors who need channel-programme expertise now, not in eighteen months.
This consulting is the design-partner and revenue engine that funds and de-risks the platform, not a side business. Every Founding Partner engagement surfaces the operational detail (which attribution disputes actually matter, which MDF workflows actually break) that Cotillion CORE, the Partner Attribution Index, and the Agent Exchange are built to solve. Consulting revenue funds product development without diluting the platform's ambition, and every vendor engagement becomes the first exchange relationship.
Insider authority that cannot be manufactured
Channel infrastructure cannot be built by outsiders. The ecosystem is a relationship network first and a technology market second, and indyrct's founding team has operated inside every node of it.
Craig Bovaird
20+ years across MSP operations, distribution (Ingram Micro), and vendor-facing channel roles. Has registered the deals, claimed the MDF, managed the vendor relationships, and navigated the partner programmes from inside every node. That is the insider authority that makes "built by the channel, for the channel" a credible claim rather than a tagline. AWS Startup Program participant; active Founders Institute cohort.
Serhii Serheiev
Third-time technical founder with ~12 years of software engineering and architecture experience. Responsible for the decisions that separate a platform from a product: cryptographic separation, knowledge-graph design, Agent Exchange routing, and MCP compliance. That is the technical authority that makes the infrastructure claim credible.
$1.5M AUD to prove the model is operational, not theoretical
The pre-seed funds the Q3 2026 MVP launch (AWS Partner Central and Microsoft Partner Center integrations live), the first twelve months of commercial validation, and the three proof points institutional capital needs to see: a working multi-vendor integration, a paying vendor customer, and at least one live Agent Exchange connection. The single highest-leverage milestone is the first paying vendor, gated on the attribution demo and verification review (H1-2027). It is the moment the platform shifts from a single-sided MSP tool to a demonstrated two-sided commercial model.
