Basis AI Raises $100M Series B at $1.15 Billion Valuation — The AI Startup That Is Quietly Transforming How Accounting Firms Operate

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a technology being discussed in boardrooms and at innovation conferences — it is actively rewriting how entire industries function from the ground up. The accounting sector, long considered one of the most process-driven and rule-bound professions in the world, is now at the center of one of the most consequential technological transitions of our time. In what is shaping up to be one of the most significant pieces of AI funding news in the financial technology space this year, Basis AI — a New York City-based AI accounting startup — has officially crossed into unicorn territory by raising $100 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation of $1.15 billion. This milestone is not just a financial achievement; it is a clear signal that enterprise AI is finding meaningful traction in sectors that were once believed to be immune to automation.

The round was led by prominent global venture capital firm Accel and saw strong participation from GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, along with legendary Wall Street figure and former Goldman Sachs Group CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and existing investor Khosla Ventures. The involvement of such high-profile investors from both the technology and traditional finance worlds adds a layer of credibility to Basis AI's vision and reinforces confidence in the company's ability to deliver real-world value at scale. With this latest round, Basis AI has now raised a total of $138 million since it was founded in 2023, making it one of the most rapidly funded AI startups to emerge in the professional services automation space.

At The AI World, we have been closely tracking the acceleration of enterprise AI adoption and the increasing flow of capital into intelligent automation solutions across critical verticals. The Basis AI funding round is a landmark development in the global AI funding landscape, and it deserves a thorough analysis that goes beyond just the numbers. Here is everything you need to know.

A $100 Million Vote of Confidence in AI-Powered Accounting

The accounting profession might not be the first industry that comes to mind when thinking about AI disruption, but the numbers tell a compelling story. Basis AI was founded in 2023 by CEO Matthew Harpe and co-founder Mitchell Troyanovsky with a single, well-defined mission: to build AI agents that work directly inside accounting firms, automating the complex, time-consuming, and repetitive work that consumes the majority of accountants' professional hours. The platform is already seeing remarkable adoption. According to the company, approximately 30 percent of the top 25 accounting firms in the United States are already using Basis, and around 20 percent of the top 150 firms across the country have integrated it into their workflows.

These are not pilot programs or experimental deployments — these are full-scale integrations of AI agents into the daily operations of major accounting firms. The platform handles tasks such as financial statement preparation, tax return filing, expense tracking, transaction categorization, bank reconciliation, and invoice processing, all of which are tasks that traditionally required significant human hours and careful manual attention. By deploying AI agents to manage these workflows end to end, firms are freeing up their most skilled professionals to focus on the advisory, strategic, and relationship-driven aspects of accounting that genuinely require human expertise and judgment.

The strategic rationale behind this AI funding round is clear. Basis AI plans to use the fresh capital to expand its customer base significantly, deepening its product capabilities specifically in the areas of tax and audit — two of the most complex and regulation-heavy domains in the accounting profession. The company also intends to aggressively grow its machine learning and engineering teams, hiring top talent to continue pushing the boundaries of what AI agents can autonomously accomplish within a professional accounting context.

Matthew Harpe, CEO of Basis, has been unambiguous about the company's goals. "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," Harpe said in a company statement following the funding announcement. This is a vision rooted in empowerment rather than displacement, and it reflects a broader and increasingly mainstream philosophy in enterprise AI: that the most impactful AI tools are those that enhance human professionals rather than replace them outright.​

The Technology Behind Basis: Long-Horizon AI Agents

What genuinely sets Basis AI apart from the growing number of AI accounting tools entering the market is its commitment to what the company calls "long-horizon agents." This is a fundamentally different category of AI system compared to most of the conversational AI tools that have captured public attention in recent years. While the majority of AI products today are designed to respond quickly to a single prompt or complete a simple task in seconds, long-horizon agents are built to work through extended, multi-step workflows independently — sometimes spending hours or even entire days resolving complex accounting tasks without requiring human intervention at every stage.

This capability is especially critical in the context of complex partnership tax returns, which represent one of the most intricate and time-intensive challenges in accounting practice. When preparing a partnership tax return, accountants must generate individual tax forms for each partner in the entity, manage unique profit-sharing arrangements that may vary significantly from partner to partner, account for different allocations of income, loss, and deductions, and sometimes file in multiple states with varying regulatory requirements. A single engagement like this can take a skilled accountant days to complete accurately. Basis has built an AI agent that can handle this entire workflow from end to end, autonomously and with a level of accuracy that meets the standards required for actual client filings.

The company's technical infrastructure is built in close collaboration with OpenAI, leveraging some of the most advanced AI models available including o3, o3-Pro, GPT-4.1, and GPT-5 to manage increasingly demanding accounting workflows. This relationship with OpenAI is not merely an integration partnership — it represents a deep, ongoing collaboration focused on pushing the frontier of what production-grade AI agents can reliably accomplish in high-stakes professional environments. According to the company, its AI agents help accounting firms save up to 30 percent of their time, which in a profession measured by billable hours represents a dramatic and quantifiable improvement in operational efficiency.

Basis AI is also one of the first platforms to announce the completion of a full business tax workbook end to end using an AI agent — a milestone the company described as the beginning of a far larger capability expansion. In their own words, the company believes that twelve months from now, the work their agents handle today will appear routine by comparison, suggesting an aggressive roadmap of capability development underpinned by significant investment in research and engineering.​

Addressing the Accountant Shortage — A Crisis That AI Is Uniquely Positioned to Solve

One of the most powerful tailwinds behind Basis AI's growth and the broader wave of AI funding flowing into accounting technology is a structural crisis in the accounting profession itself. The United States is experiencing a deepening shortage of qualified accountants, and the problem is not going away on its own. According to data from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, demand for accountants and auditors is expected to grow steadily over the next several years, with tens of thousands of new positions needing to be filled. However, the supply side of the equation is moving in the opposite direction.

Fewer university students are choosing accounting as a career path, deterred by the combination of rigorous licensing requirements, demanding work conditions during tax season, and the perception that the profession offers limited creativity or upward mobility relative to other high-paying fields. At the same time, a large cohort of experienced accounting professionals is approaching retirement age, creating a looming exodus of institutional knowledge and practiced expertise. The Big Four accounting firms — Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG — and thousands of mid-sized and regional firms across the country are all grappling with this talent pipeline problem simultaneously.

This is precisely where AI agents like those built by Basis come in. By automating the routine, time-consuming tasks that entry-level and mid-level accountants have traditionally been responsible for — the data entry, the reconciliation, the standard tax filings — AI technology effectively amplifies the productive output of the accountants who are still in the workforce. A firm that previously needed ten junior accountants to process a given volume of client work might now manage the same workload with five or six, with the remaining professionals elevated to advisory roles where they can develop deeper client relationships, provide strategic guidance, and command higher billing rates.

Matt Harpe has articulated this vision clearly and consistently. When accountants are freed from the repetitive mechanical tasks that consume most of their time, they can focus on what truly matters — providing strategic insights, helping clients make informed decisions on tax strategy, guiding capital allocation decisions, and supporting long-term financial planning. This is the promise of AI in professional services, and Basis AI appears to be one of the companies best positioned to deliver on it at scale.

A Rapidly Expanding and Competitive AI Accounting Landscape

The Basis AI funding round does not exist in isolation. It is part of a much larger and rapidly accelerating wave of AI funding news reshaping the financial services and accounting technology sectors in 2025 and into 2026. The competitive landscape is becoming increasingly crowded, with well-funded startups, established fintech players, and technology giants all converging on the same fundamental opportunity: the automation of finance and accounting workflows using artificial intelligence.

Earlier this month, General Catalyst — one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms — invested $65 million in Accrual, another AI accounting software startup competing in the same broad market as Basis. In January 2026, French fintech unicorn Pennylane secured an enormous €175 million funding round led by TCV, with participation from Sequoia Capital, DST Global, CapitalG, and Meritech Capital. Pennylane, which serves approximately 4,500 accounting firms and over 800,000 businesses primarily across Europe, is also doubling down on generative AI capabilities, building an intelligent analysis co-pilot designed to help accountants interpret financial data and deliver richer, more proactive insights to their business clients.

The market turbulence created by AI advancements in financial services is already visible in public market reactions. Earlier this month, financial data provider stocks fell sharply after Anthropic unveiled a new AI model it claimed could handle complex financial research with a high degree of accuracy — a development that rattled investors in traditional financial information services businesses. Similarly, wealth management stocks experienced a decline after Altruist Corp launched AI agents capable of performing automated tax planning for wealth management clients, demonstrating that AI is not only disrupting back-office accounting functions but is beginning to encroach on higher-value advisory services as well.

This broader AI funding news landscape reflects a market that is rapidly bifurcating between those who are embracing AI as a core capability and those who risk being left behind. For The AI World, this moment represents a critical inflection point — one where the investments being made today in AI-native professional services platforms will define the competitive landscape for accounting, finance, and adjacent professional services industries for the next decade.

What Basis AI's Unicorn Status Means for the Future of AI in Finance

The achievement of unicorn status by Basis AI within just two years of its founding is a striking testament to the pace at which enterprise AI is maturing and finding commercial adoption in even the most traditionally conservative industries. In a market where many AI startups have struggled to translate impressive technology demonstrations into durable, paying customer relationships, Basis has done something genuinely difficult — it has built production-grade AI agents that accounting firms are willing to trust with actual client work, actual tax filings, and actual financial statements.

The $1.15 billion valuation also sends a powerful message to the broader investment community about the size of the opportunity in professional services automation. Accounting alone is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar global industry, and the addressable market for AI tools that can meaningfully augment or automate significant portions of that work is enormous. With $138 million in total capital raised and a growing roster of top-25 accounting firms as customers, Basis AI is well positioned to continue its expansion into audit, advisory, and international markets over the coming years.

For AI World and the global AI community, this AI funding news round is more than just a business milestone — it is a window into where enterprise AI is headed. The era of AI as a novelty or an experimental tool is firmly behind us. What we are witnessing now is the deployment of AI agents into real, complex, high-stakes professional environments, where they are demonstrating measurable, documented value that justifies significant and growing investment. Basis AI is at the forefront of this shift, and its trajectory over the coming years will be one of the most closely watched stories in the intersection of artificial intelligence and professional services. As more firms recognize the potential of AI-driven workflows, the pace of adoption will only accelerate — and with it, the scale of AI funding flowing into the most capable platforms in the space.