Introduction

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I'm thrilled to announce the public launch of Materia, the first comprehensive generative AI platform built specifically for public accounting & audit firms. With over $6.3 million in funding led by Spark Capital, along with participation from Haystack Ventures, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Exponential Founders Capital, and the Allen Institute for AI, we're on a mission to revolutionize public accounting.

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While working in Audit at KPMG earlier in my career, I experienced firsthand the painful and tedious tasks that are common throughout engagements. Countless hours spent on low-value, repetitive work that could be better focused on more energizing and value-adding tasks. This experience stuck in the back of my mind over the years while later working in machine learning teams at Amazon and Facebook. 

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In the mid-late 2010s, performant off the shelf models for OCR, text extraction, and classification were starting to become widely available from cloud providers. This wave of ML capabilities unlocked significant value for a range of tasks, but was mostly incorporated into the routine process automation side of corporate accounting software (e.g. invoice processing, AP/AR automation, bookkeeping, etc).

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At the same time, the professional services side of the accounting world (i.e. Public Accounting and Assurance) experienced relatively lower impact from this wave of innovation. In some part because these markets were often overlooked or not well understood, but more critically because that wave of ML was not sufficient for the needs of public accounting workflows. 

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There is a misconception that accounting is based 100% on deterministic rules & structured datasets, but this is not the case. Accounting involves many areas of gray (this is a feature, not a bug) to allow for interpretation & subjectivity. Audits involve mountains of unstructured data & qualitative considerations, and the workflows themselves feature significant variation across the long tail. All of these factors together made it difficult to drive meaningful holistic improvements relying on classic ML. 

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Enter the transformer and generative AI. After spending years building models that took herculean efforts to classify a single piece of text (and that was all it could do), it was clear to Lucas and I that this new wave represented a paradigm shift in what was possible and how work would be done in the future. The strengths of generative AI also neatly matched up against the unaddressed needs from public accounting technology around handling unstructured data, dealing with ambiguity & qualitative considerations, and flexibly handling task variation. 

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Our vision is to build broadly capable automation (and augmentation) for the public accounting industry. Our approach is to build an AI system that: 1.) understands the “logic of accounting” and can perform domain specific reasoning, 2.) that has access to all of the same knowledge and context that a human professional would have, and 3.) is equipped with domain specific tools & capabilities that are necessary for carrying out common tasks for CPAs. These building blocks come together to form a highly capable AI Agent platform specialized to the unique needs of the public accounting profession. 

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We have been working in stealth for over the past year to build and iterate Materia with firms across the top 100, and as large as the top 15. We have been energized by the unanimously positive & enthusiastic reception from users, and we are even more energized from the potential of what is coming soon as a result of our compounding investments. 

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With this funding, we're excited to accelerate our product development and expand our team of talented engineers and accounting experts. I want to thank our incredible team, investors, and early customers for believing in our mission and joining us on this journey. Together, we're building a future where accountants can focus on the work that truly matters, leveraging the power of AI to drive efficiency and quality in their day-to-day workflows.

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If you're an accounting firm looking to supercharge your team with generative AI, we'd love to hear from you. Visit our website at trymateria.ai to learn more and sign up for a demo.

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The future of accounting is here, and it's powered by Materia.

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Kevin Merlini & Lucas Adams

Co-founders, Materia

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