Most software founders ship one product, sometimes two. Nikhil Jathar has shipped a portfolio.
As co-founder and chief technology officer of AvanSaber, the enterprise software company he founded in Pune, India in 2014 with co-founder Varun Borawake, Jathar has presided over three acquisitions in roughly a decade. What he is building now sits across two products and five United States patent applications filed in 2026. The company released ERPClaw, an open-source AI-native enterprise resource planning system, in 2026 under an MIT license. ERPClaw consolidates the team’s earlier CraftAgent and EntAgent agent-orchestration work into a single patent-protected platform. Alongside it, the team filed two patent applications on TailTest, a behavioral testing framework for AI agent systems.
The acquisition track record
A consistent engineering philosophy underpins AvanSaber’s track record: identify a distinct market friction, build the solution from the ground up, and determine the optimal path for scale, whether by integrating the technology into a larger internal platform or transitioning it to a strategic acquirer. Each transaction has had its own structure.
This approach was clearly demonstrated in 2023, when ZapERP, AvanSaber’s early SaaS automation product, naturally drew acquirer interest after establishing a strong public footprint and a dedicated base of paying customers.
The strategy evolved further with the 2024 acquisition of ZapInventory by InvenSync Inc, which reshaped the relationship between AvanSaber and InvenSync going forward. Built entirely in-house as a comprehensive multi-channel platform, ZapInventory featured advanced capabilities including barcode scanning, order synchronization across channels, and multi-location support. Independent third-party software discovery platforms had recognized the product, including listings in Crozdesk’s curated rankings. The deal not only validated the product’s technical depth but also forged a lasting strategic partnership, resulting in Jathar retaining equity and securing a board seat.
Similarly, the 2024 acquisition of AvanSaber’s mobile gaming portfolio by QCPlay Digital Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong highlighted the team’s engineering versatility. Anchored by the hit title Super Snail, which surpassed a million documented downloads across major app stores, the rollout proved that AvanSaber could build highly engaging products capable of plugging directly into massive global distribution networks. The mobile rollup acquisition was structurally different from the inventory and SaaS deals: the team had built and shipped the games, and an acquirer with mobile distribution scale picked up the line.
What he is building now: ERPClaw and TailTest
ERPClaw is AvanSaber’s largest consolidation effort to date. The product ships with forty-eight modules covering accounting, inventory, sales, manufacturing, HR, payroll, CRM, and analytics. Fourteen industry-specific verticals sit on top, with regional compliance modules for India, Canada, the UK, and the EU.
The software is open-source MIT-licensed and self-hosted. The company publishes a pricing comparison on its homepage that contrasts SAP Business One at fifty-four thousand US dollars a year, NetSuite at twelve thousand, and QuickBooks Enterprise at nine hundred sixty against ERPClaw at zero.
ERPClaw is built on OpenClaw, the open-source autonomous AI agent framework released by independent developer Peter Steinberger. OpenClaw’s sponsors include OpenAI, GitHub, and NVIDIA, and NVIDIA has released NemoClaw, a tooling layer for running OpenClaw inside enterprise environments. TechCrunch covered Red Hat’s enterprise security work on the framework. ERPClaw is one of the early production applications built on the OpenClaw runtime; AvanSaber has separately released a compliance-automation application called AudEng, announced publicly in January 2026 as “auditengine”, on the same framework.
The patent portfolio around ERPClaw consists of three United States patent applications filed in 2026. The lead application was filed as a non-provisional and covers an architecture that lets an AI agent write or modify code inside a live ERP without breaking the financial integrity rules. Two additional applications cover risk-based tiered autonomy in AI deployment and natural-language-driven module configuration.
TailTest, separately, is a behavioral testing framework for AI agent systems. AvanSaber filed two patent applications on TailTest in 2026, covering behavioral test generation and cost-efficient evaluation of AI agent systems. The team has also submitted research papers to IEEE conferences.
The market the products are aimed at
ERPClaw’s pricing comparison signals the buyer the company is going after: mid-market businesses, regulated industries, and cross-border operators who have historically been priced out of enterprise resource planning. The buyer profile spans accounting and finance teams looking for an alternative to QuickBooks Enterprise, mid-market operations leaders evaluating NetSuite, and IT directors at growing companies who would otherwise inherit SAP Business One.
The fourteen industry verticals cover healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, professional services, and other regulated segments where compliance modules matter as much as the core ledger. Self-hosted deployment under the MIT license keeps data ownership with the customer, which matters in jurisdictions with data-residency requirements and in industries where audit trails sit on the customer’s infrastructure rather than a vendor’s cloud.
TailTest is aimed at a different audience: engineering teams shipping AI features into production. AI agent platforms, AI-native software products, and enterprise applications adopting generative components share a testing problem that traditional unit and integration testing cannot address, where a model’s output is non-deterministic and behavioral correctness has to be measured probabilistically rather than asserted exactly. TailTest is built for that work, and the tiered-assertion architecture covered in the patent application is designed to make the testing economics workable at production scale.
The integration ecosystem and customer signals
ERPClaw Accounting is live on the Stripe Marketplace. The Stripe marketplace review process examines an application’s payment-handling and reporting integrity before approval, so the listing is a non-trivial credential for an accounting product. A Shopify integration is in development and is expected to publish in the coming weeks.
AvanSaber holds SAP PartnerEdge Open Ecosystem Partner status as a separate corporate credential, established before the ERPClaw release. The company also operates a US-focused AI vertical that has worked with utility-sector ERP modernization, including a recent engagement supporting a major US utility’s customer-service AI initiative. Workloads from the AI practice inform ERPClaw’s industry-vertical modules.
Early ERPClaw users feature on the project’s homepage. They include a co-founder of two consumer-tech and travel ventures, a founder of an AI-native software-tools company, an enterprise software sales and marketing veteran, and an independent director at a financial-services firm. ERPClaw was released in early 2026 and accumulated more than thirty-five GitHub stars in its first month of public listing.
The standing beyond the products
Beyond the product work, Jathar is an IEEE Senior Member with multiple consecutive years of participation in IEEE-USA Congressional Visits Day. His federal meetings in 2025 and 2026 included staff from Senator Ted Cruz’s office, Senator John Cornyn’s office, Representative Lloyd Doggett’s office, and Representative Greg Casar’s office. He joined the Texas Legislative Visit Day organized by the IEEE Lone Star Section in San Antonio on April 22, 2026, hosted at the San Antonio Museum of Science and Technology.
AvanSaber operates from offices in San Antonio, Pune, and Los Angeles, with more than fifteen engineers across the three locations.
The road from here
ERPClaw and TailTest are both planning Producthunt launches very soon. The bet across the patent portfolio, the open-source distribution, the integration ecosystem, and the cross-border team is that AI-native enterprise software, with patent-protected integrity guarantees and a serious behavioral testing framework, is the durable shape of the next decade of enterprise IT.
Asked about the pattern across his decade of building, Jathar describes his motivation clearly.
“I am an engineer at heart, and my passion is seeing the things we build out in the wild, actually solving hard, foundational problems,” Jathar explains. “For a decade, our pattern was to build, validate, and let a strategic acquirer take the product to the masses. But what we are building now with ERPClaw and TailTest is different. We are not just shipping a feature; we are architecting an ecosystem. The patents protect the architecture, and the open-source distribution is our way of directly empowering the mid-market businesses that have historically been priced out of this level of technology.”
Whether the bet pays out will be tested in the next two to five years by whether mid-market and enterprise customers actually deploy the platform.ERPClaw is open source under the MIT license at ERPClaw.AI, TailTest documentation is at TailTest.com, and AudEng is at AuditClaw.AI.
