Oct 18, 2023
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Basis Raises $3.6m with an AI Platform for Accounting Firms

Mitchell Troyanovsky
Matthew Harpe

Our Fundraise

We are excited to announce the Basis Platform and our $3.6M seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from BoxGroup, Avid Ventures, several top accounting firms, and leaders from the accounting and machine learning communities.

A New Era of Accounting

Accounting is the language companies use to understand their businesses and make decisions. It’s a critical and often under-appreciated part of our market economy. The tireless work of accountants to ensure that businesses, non-profits, governments, and the general public can make financial decisions with accurate and trusted data is crucial to the functioning of our economy.

Many businesses in America rely on their accountant for far more than the traditional roles of maintaining books and filing taxes. For many businesses, accountants are among their most trusted advisors, in charge of steering them through both routine planning and unchartered waters.

Yet, with the massive shortage of accountants, 300,000 accountants quitting in the past several years, fewer students entering the field, and more accounting firms turning down clients due to workload constraints, we are at risk of losing this crucial advisory piece to the business, non-profit, and government communities and undermining trust more broadly.

The emergent abilities of large ML models to reason through tasks and solve complex problems will change the very nature of work for accounting and finance professionals. Accountants will have a team of AI assistants working both alongside them and autonomously, completing core workflows end-to-end. This will not only ease the accountant shortage and allow accountants to focus on advice, judgment, and strategy, but it will dramatically improve the quality of service and array of offerings that accountants can provide their clients.

If you believe, like us (and Sam Altman), that the marginal cost of intelligence over the next decade will trend toward zero, then we are facing the largest transformation in how finance, accounting, and by extension, our economy will function since the spreadsheet… maybe even the computer.

The Basis Platform

We believe that unlocking the potential of these emergent abilities requires far more than chatbots bolted onto the side of a product. It requires being a core part of the workflow. This is why we partner with accounting firms across practice areas to build and iterate on solutions that are native to the workflows.

Our platform is already serving clients across CFO advisory, assurance, client accounting services, bookkeeping, and more.

Following in the footsteps in generations of accountants, our platform is built around three principles: trust, transparency, and verification. Accounting firms earn their reputations over years of handling their clients' sensitive data with the utmost attention to detail and care. In the same way that an accounting firm would instill those principles in a new hire, we have done the same from day 0 with the models we build.

Moving Forward

This investment gives us the resources to broaden our partnerships and scale our team. It took almost 25 years to move from paper ledgers to digital spreadsheets. It took 15 years for the majority of accounting systems to move from desktop to cloud based software.

The AI revolution will happen much faster. Basis is ready to lead the charge.