Our investment in Materia
Picture this: you’re a CPA drowning in a sea of audits, reviews, and one-off projects during busy season. You’re constantly overwhelmed and underdelivering. Suddenly, your boss walks into your office and drops a bombshell: a dozen more clients are landing on your plate because a colleague is leaving. Your head spins thinking about the mountains of documents you’ll need to crunch to meet these new demands. Your heart races thinking about your client deadlines. You’re at a breaking point — and you’re not alone.
In an industry where 75% of CPAs are set to retire in the next 15 years and new talent has dropped by 30%, the demand for accountants is at an all time high. Overworked and understaffed, accountants are struggling to keep up with client demands in an environment that’s only getting tougher.
While the accounting profession has historically been underserved by technology, recent advances in AI now make it possible to supercharge workflows that were previously impossible to automate due to the amount of unstructured data, subjective/qualitative judgments, and variation in tasks across the long tail. A CPA’s day to day client work often involves performing repetitive, manual tasks and analyses, such as data entry, reconciliation, and document review, on large volumes of structured and unstructured data, such as contracts, invoices, and various financial documents. Large language models are perfect for automating these tasks, allowing accountants to focus on high-value work that requires human expertise and judgment, such as the most critical aspects of an audit or client interaction. By shifting the burden of these tasks to AI, firms can reduce employee burnout and improve overall productivity.
Why waste a professional’s time on tedious tasks when an AI system specifically designed for accounting can do the job faster and more thoroughly?
Enter Materia. I’m thrilled to announce our Seed investment in Materia, an AI-powered platform for public accounting firms. Materia’s platform streamlines accounting workflows by consolidating a firm’s scattered files and documents into a secure, searchable knowledge base with AI-powered tools that sit on top to automate repetitive tasks, answer questions, and provide intelligent recommendations for complex decisions — all while adhering to a firm’s best practices and authoritative accounting standards. The solution has been uniquely designed with trust and auditability at its core, providing the ability to quickly see citations and references data from any AI-generated work.
When we met Materia founders Kevin and Lucas, we were struck by their deep domain expertise across both accounting and AI. In a short amount of time, Materia has built a stellar team (they’re hiring!) and earned the trust of top accounting firms, like Clark Nuber and a number of other Top 100 firms that are using Materia across their entire audit practice.
We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Kevin, Lucas, and the entire Materia team, and an awesome group of co-investors, like Thomson Reuters Ventures, Allen Institute for AI, Exponent Founders Capital, and Haystack Ventures. Welcome, Materia!