The $50B Graveyard: Two Guys from San Francisco Are Rebuilding ERP with AI Agents

Seventy percent of ERP implementations fail. Not 'miss the mark.' Fail. Blown budgets. Missed deadlines. Systems that don't match reality. The kind of failure that gets people fired and companies sued.

The remaining thirty percent? They cost 0 billion a year in consulting fees. Someone has to map the requirements. Configure the workflows. Test the data. Train the users. Hold the stakeholders' hands through the nightmare.

Matthew Chow and Victor Vannara watched this machine from the inside. Chow at Tesla and Zipline. Vannara at Amazon and A Thinking Ape (YC W08). They saw the same pattern everywhere: smart people drowning in spreadsheets, meetings, and configuration drift. Requirements that got lost in translation. Testing that revealed the system didn't match what was promised — two weeks before go-live.

So they built Trope. Two people. San Francisco. Summer 2026 YC batch.

An AI-native ERP implementation platform

It connects to existing project systems. Compares what was promised against what was built. Flags gaps in scope, configuration, data, testing, training, and documentation — automatically. It turns meetings into action items, scans configurations programmatically, and keeps every stakeholder in sync without a 50-person team running spreadsheets.

Their YC partner is Jon Xu. The company is live.

"The engineers who hate vibe coding and AI the most are the people who would benefit the most from embracing it."

— Garry Tan, via TheFoundersPack

The resistance will come from consultants — not customers. The 00/hour consulting model is being vaporized. Trope sells to the consulting firms themselves, turning potential enemies into customers. Partners who adopt Trope deliver faster, cheaper implementations. Those who don't lose every competitive bid.

ERP is a 0B graveyard. Two guys from San Francisco just showed up with shovels.

Links: YC Profile | Website | @mattchowx | Partner: Jon Xu