ChatGPT could not answer his question — so 25-year-old Márk built his own AI startup

Forbes.hu sat down with Máté Márk — the 25-year-old founder and CEO of azta — in a co-working space in Óbuda, where he is building his mostly-Szeged team's AI research tool made specifically for tax and accounting work. Tax and business law is not the field that usually excites young founders, the profile notes, yet it is where Márk found the problem that finally turned into a marketable product.

By the end of the year we will hold the largest tax and business-law knowledge base in Europe, of anyone.

The question that started it

In November 2024, Márk had a question about his own sole proprietorship and could not find a clear answer. He turned to the general AI models first — ChatGPT and Claude — but quickly realised only a small fraction of their answers held up; there was too much hallucination. That, he told Forbes, was the founding idea: a research tool that, in every case, marks which source it used.

He describes spending four or five hours joining accountants' Facebook groups to hunt down the answer, only to find flatly contradictory comments under the posts. "As a layperson, I wondered — how is this even possible?"

A large, underserved market

Márk frames the opportunity in scale. Per the European Commission there are 33.5 million businesses in Europe; the big advisory firms cover roughly 10%, about 35% try to manage on their own, and the rest, he argues, simply are not served by anyone.

Where azta is today

• 14,000 users, with more than 150,000 questions answered.
• A tax and business-law knowledge base spanning 20 European jurisdictions.
• A €400,000 pre-seed round (about HUF 154M) closed in April 2026, led by an angel investor who also backed Barion at pre-seed.

The capital, the piece reports, is earmarked for building out a full pan-European knowledge base — the next step toward the year-end goal Márk opens the interview with.

A research tool, not an oracle

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Anyone can try azta for free. But it is important to stress: this is a research tool that mainly helps you put an informed question to the experts.

Trust runs through the whole conversation. "The market we are in is built on trust," Márk says, "and trust is something you can only squander once." Co-founder Attila Sándor — once Márk's manager at Asura Technologies — is now the company's chief revenue officer, and lead AI researcher Bálint Kővári rounds out the founding group behind the parent company, Phantic Kft.