When cybersecurity veteran Michael Assraf started working with managed service providers – better known as MSPs – he saw the same struggle play out again and again: small IT firms drowning in vendor fees and repetitive technical work that barely moved the needle.
“They’re paying twice for the same problem: once to vendors and again to technicians,” he told Refresh Miami. “The result is razor-thin margins and no room to grow.”
That frustration turned into his latest startup, Flamingo, which officially launched this week from its base in Miami Beach after months in stealth. The company’s platform, OpenFrame, combines open-source infrastructure with autonomous AI agents that automate everything from password resets to threat detection, helping MSPs operate more like software companies.
Flamingo’s launch comes with $2.2 million in pre-seed funding, including from local investors Focal VC and Nico Berardi from Animo VC. “Two of our first checks came from Miami,” said Assraf [pictured above]. “I think that says a lot about where the ecosystem is heading.”
Before launching Flamingo, Assraf built a cybersecurity startup in Israel and later moved to the U.S., first in New York and then Miami.
“I started to work more with MSPs and saw their struggle with a lot of licenses, automation, inefficiencies,” he said. “When I moved on from my previous business, I knew I was going to start something in this space because it’s very underserved and full of potential.”
Flamingo’s mission is to flip the economics of the MSP industry, which globally generates about $380 billion in annual revenue but often operates on single-digit profit margins. Assraf believes combining AI and open source is the key.
“If you automate 50% of the work using AI, maybe you increase their margins by five or ten percent,” he explained. “But if you also eliminate the vendor fees through open source, that’s where you can really change their economics. We allow MSPs to become almost like software vendors themselves.”
That idea is catching on. Since launching its OpenMSP community in July, Flamingo has attracted over 1,000 MSPs to its waitlist – about 3% of the market – with more than 200 actively collaborating through Slack and its community platform. Around 30 are already testing the software, with a free beta available through early 2026.
Flamingo’s investors see major potential in the model. “By merging open source with autonomous AI, they’re attacking the two biggest pain points in the industry head-on,” Pascal Unger, Managing Partner at Focal VC, shared in a statement.
Beyond the product, Assraf is building something larger: a local ecosystem around cybersecurity and startup culture. He founded a community called Miami Cybergang, a group of about 50 entrepreneurs, investors, and security professionals who meet regularly and are now partnering with Miami Dade College on a hackathon this November.
“Our goal is to show students that their dream shouldn’t always be to go work for Citadel or one of the big algo companies,” he said. “They should see if they can join or start their own startup. It’s about changing mindsets.”
Assraf said Miami has been an ideal base to build Flamingo: affordable enough to bootstrap early on, yet increasingly connected to venture capital. “There’s a lot of money in Miami that used to go into real estate and is now looking for tech,” he said. “I didn’t plan to raise here, but that’s exactly what happened.”
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