A vendor that provides AI for accountants has achieved unicorn status following its latest funding round.
New York City-based Basis confirmed a $100 million Series B round that now sees it valued at $1.15 billion.
The round was led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel, with further backing from GV (formerly Google Ventures), ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and venture capital firm Khosla Ventures.
Basis was founded in 2023, when it completed a $3.6 million seed round, followed by a $34 million Series A round in December 2024.
The vendor’s product offering is centered on agentic AI systems that can introduce end-to-end automation to a number of key areas for accounting businesses, including client account services, taxation and auditing. These can assist with tasks such as tracking expenses, completing tax returns, and preparing financial statements.
Basis likens its approach to that of common agentic coding platforms. It builds “long-horizon” agents that operate autonomously on complex tasks over many hours, using models from labs such as OpenAI to deliver accurate results.
Prashant Mital, applied AI lead at OpenAI, said in a release that Basis has “pushed the limits of what we thought our models could do on real-world, economically valuable, complex accounting tasks.”
Among Basis’ recent developments was a successful automated completion of a 1065 tax return, which requires an accountant to produce individual tax documents for all partners in a business.
Increased use of AI in accounting is becoming a necessity, with the industry suffering from what Basis describes as a “decades-long” talent shortage. Fewer students than ever are training to become accountants, forcing many companies to turn away work, increasing the pressure on existing staff and squeezing margins.
According to Basis CEO Matt Harpe, the company is focused on addressing these shortages to ensure its human staff can focus on the most important work, such as providing strategic advice to clients.
“Our sole focus is to equip accountants with the highest performing, most accurate AI for accounting and to empower firms to drive new growth, provide higher-value service, and improve accountant quality of life across every one of their practices.”
Basis says it is already working with about 30% of the top 25 accounting companies and will use the latest injection of capital to accelerate development of its platform and bolster its engineering and machine learning teams.
