Basis Raises $34M to Advance AI Agents for Accounting

Matt Harpe

New York-based Basis, which is developing artificial intelligence agents for accounting tasks, has raised $34 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures.

The startup focusing on a real-world application of AI also attracted other investors including NFDG, a fund founded by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and former Apple executive Daniel Gross; OpenAI board members Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo; and Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean. Prior investors include Better Tomorrow Ventures, BoxGroup and New York’s Avid Ventures.

Junior Accountant Skills

“The emergent abilities of large ML [machine learning] models to reason through tasks and solve complex problems will change the very nature of work for accounting and finance professionals,” Basis said in a blog post. “Accountants will have a team of AI assistants working both alongside them and autonomously, completing core workflows end-to-end.”

Basis’ early product functions like a junior accountant, with its AI agents handling data entry and double-checking ledger entries, tasks that typically require significant manual work amid shortages of qualified accountants. It also integrates data with popular ledger systems like Intuit’s QuickBooks and Xero.

Wizz, a large accounting firm, is believed to have achieved 30% savings in time spent on handling ordinary accounting tasks. Besides Wiss, Basis says its platform has been used by several other top 100 accounting firms in the United States.

Research-Focused Founders

Founded by researchers Zenna Tavares, Emily Mackevicius and Eli Bingham, Basis is led by the fourth co-founder, Matt Harpe, a former Boston Consulting Group and Softbank executive.

Tavares is an innovation scholar in Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, and associate research scientist in the Data Science Institute. Mackevicius, who leads Basis’ Collaborative Intelligent Systems group, did her postdoctoral work studying memory-expert birds in the Aronov lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia. Bingham is a machine learning fellow in the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a co-creator and core developer of the Pyro probabilistic programming language. He was previously a senior research scientist at Uber AI Labs.

“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,” Basis said on its blog. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the leading AI developer.