Why Join - Basis

Here’s a wild stat: over 300,000 accountants have left the profession in the last few years.

I should know, I was one of them (started my career in Big 4 accounting as a CPA).

Just wasn't for me 🙂.

CPA exam candidates dropped 33% between 2016 and 2021. And roughly 75% of current CPAs are hitting retirement age in the next 10 years. Staffing is now the #1 cited challenge for CPA firms.

The profession is literally running out of people.

And it's not like the work is getting simpler. Globalization, evolving tax codes, and the complexity of modern business mean accountants are doing more work than ever before. The space has been underserved by technology for 20+ years, and accountants still report spending half their time on manual or tedious tasks. Burnout is at an all-time high.

Meanwhile, accounting services generated $145B in revenue in the US last year. This is not some niche corner of the economy. Accounting is the language companies use to understand their businesses and make decisions. It underpins everything. As one Basis team member put it, "accounting is the bedrock of our economy."

So what happens when the bedrock starts cracking?

Offshoring was supposed to be the answer, but it hasn't delivered - poor work quality, high turnover, and time zone challenges have left most firms back at square one. On top of that, labor shortages are driving salaries up, client expectations are growing, and competition is accelerating. Margins are getting squeezed from every direction.

And there's a massive wave of PE investment flooding into the accounting space right now, which is raising the stakes even further. Roll-ups want to inject technology into their portfolio firms, and that's creating a whole new buyer.

Where it gets interesting: a 2023 OpenAI paper concluded that AI-driven automation could impact 100% of accountants' and auditors' tasks.

But generic AI tools can't do accounting. Accounting isn't one-size-fits-all. Each client has different practices, each engagement has different requirements, and every accountant knows that the devil is in the details. A ChatGPT wrapper isn't going to close your books.

Basis is filling this gap.

I cannot stress this enough: TAM is a huge predictor of your future growth at a company, most especially in GTM.

I didn't optimize for this at one of my last companies before vibescaling, and it ended up being quite a limiting factor. Hope you all don't make the same mistake I did 🙂.

Accounting is the 4th largest occupation in America with over 3.1 million people working in accounting-related roles. That's just behind cashiers. And that's before you count the millions in adjacent areas like financial analysis, or those working outside the US.

The US accounting services market alone is $145B+. And unlike selling another AI tool to tech companies, this market isn't going anywhere. Companies will always need their books closed. Audits will always need to happen. Tax season isn't getting cancelled. This market is recession-proof.

Now here's where it gets really interesting from a GTM lens: the AI accounting market is projected to grow from $5B in 2024 to $100B in a short period of time. That's the kind of wave you want to be riding.

Now let's talk fragmentation.

There are thousands of accounting firms in the US. The top 100 are major enterprises, but the market extends deep into mid-market and regional firms. Most are still running on legacy workflows and manual data entry. Very few have been pitched AI in any meaningful way.

For a seller, this is greenfield territory.

And here's the kicker: these firms already spend heavily on software. They're paying for ERP systems, tax prep tools, audit platforms. But the software landscape is dominated by 30+ year-old vendors. Thomson Reuters is a $35-45B company. Wolters Kluwer is $15-20B. These are massive incumbents running on decades-old technology - and that's who Basis is coming for.

Basis isn't asking firms to adopt their first piece of technology. It's asking them to upgrade from 1990s software to AI agents. That's a very different conversation than pitching a feature.

The "why now" is crystal clear. LLMs have finally reached the capability level where they can understand accounting workflows, reason through complex transactions, and take real actions. Basis was one of the first to bet on this back in 2023, and they're at the very beginning of the S-curve for AI adoption in accounting.

Big market. Clear pain. Incumbents ripe for disruption. And a timing window that's wide open.

When Basis started in 2023, they set out to build something totally different from existing accounting technology.

Basis is building AI agents that do real accounting work.

The key word is agents. These aren't tools that summarize documents or answer questions. Basis agents onboard onto accounting engagements, learn the specific client's needs, and execute workflows end-to-end. They close books. They reconcile accounts. They process transactions. They generate work papers.

Think of it this way: what if every accountant had a team of 100 junior accountants that could work 24/7?

That's the Basis vision. And they're actually delivering on it.

What sets Basis apart from every other AI tool in the space: they're the only AI accounting platform serving all major practice areas - Audit, Tax, TAS, CAS, Family Office, and Estate & Trust. Each of those practice areas could be its own multi-billion dollar company. Basis is going after all of accounting, and they’re seeing strong traction so far.

Their product integrates directly with existing accounting systems, ledgers, file systems, and platforms that firms are already using. It's not asking accountants to change how they work. It's giving them an army of intelligent assistants that plug into their existing workflow and can automate almost any accounting workflow.

Here's why it's sticky:

Agents over chatbots. Basis made a bet from day one on systems that do work, not just talk about work. Their agents handle things like transferring transaction details from scanned receipts into a centralized ledger, identifying errors in entries, and adapting to different clients' financial data management styles.

Understanding over memorization. Most software is brittle. Basis is built to understand accounting broadly and adapt its intelligence to the specific engagement. It doesn't break when it encounters something new.

Colleague, not competitor. Basis sells exclusively to accountants. They're not trying to replace accounting firms or sell directly to businesses. They're making accountants more powerful.

One thing I think is really underrated about Basis: they built a Deployed Intelligence team that's core to how they go to market. They hire actual accountants across practice areas - not just to support customers, but to help build the product, inform the sales motion, and run implementation. Think of it as forward-deployed accountants who make the AI smarter and the customer experience way stickier. This isn't a generic CS team reading from a script. These are practitioners.

Now let's talk results.

Firms using Basis are seeing 20-50% efficiency gains today, with a target of 40-80% by end of year. Monthly closes that used to take 15 days are happening in 5.

And here's a stat that should make every seller's ears perk up: Basis ended 2025 working with 30% of the top 25 firms and 20% of the top 150 - including top 10 firms. With one person in sales and marketing.

That's the kind of market pull you dream about.

For a seller, you're not pitching a nice-to-have. You're pitching an employee who works 24/7, handles the most tedious parts of the job, and makes the accountant's job way easier. The ROI conversation practically writes itself.

Matt Harpe (CEO) and Mitchell Troyanovsky (Co-Founder) are long-time friends (and fellow New Yorkers) who started Basis after seeing the inefficiencies in accounting workflows firsthand.

Matt's background is in data science consulting at BCG, where he quickly realized how rarely organizations leverage granular accounting data in their decision-making. He's a Harvard grad who saw the opportunity to apply cutting-edge AI to one of the most foundational functions in business.

Mitch is a Babson grad and former Goldman alum who witnessed the importance of accounting data across industries and the pain of the professionals trying to manage it all.

They left their careers, started building Basis in 2023, and haven't looked back.

Here's what I like most: despite the elite backgrounds and VC backing, this team is obsessed with the practitioner. They've spent time embedded with accountants, understanding exactly how workflows break down in the real world. They're building for accountants, not theorizing about them from a WeWork.

The investor list tells you everything you need to know about the caliber of this company. The $34M Series A was led by Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures, with participation from:

That is one of the most stacked cap tables I've seen at the Series A stage.

And now their Series B is led by top investors as well, which is always a strong signal for you to join off of.

One more thing worth calling out: Basis has built an internal team called Atlas whose entire mandate is to make every employee at the company 100x more productive using AI. They're not just building AI agents for customers. They're dogfooding the technology internally and building what could be one of the first "internal agent teams" in the industry.

They own everything from internal tooling to agent development across the whole company. In the PC era, someone had to build the first IT team. In the internet era, someone had to build the first data team. Atlas might be that for the agent era. That's the kind of bet that tells you this team is thinking 5 years ahead, not 5 months.

The team works five days a week out of their NYC Flatiron office. The founders are first in, last out. The culture is intense, collaborative, and high-agency. They do non-mandatory team dinners Monday through Thursday with meal stipends covered. This is a team that's all-in on the mission.

On one final note - been working with their head of GTM, George, a bunch now - and he’s one of my favorite sales leaders to work with. Thoughtful, cerebral, not salesy - definitely a culture I would want to join personally.

Alright, let's talk about why this actually matters for your career, and why we think Basis is a good bet.

The problem is real and the buyer knows it.

This is the dream scenario. You're not selling a nice-to-have dashboard where you have to spend the first 20 minutes of every call educating the prospect. Every accounting firm in America is feeling the talent shortage. They know their staff is burned out. They know they're losing people. When you show up with a product that can take 20-50% of the manual work off their plate, you're solving a problem they're already desperate to fix.

And these firms aren't skeptical about AI - there's massive market pull right now. Accounting firms are genuinely excited to adopt this technology. You're not dragging buyers across the finish line. They're coming to you.

The market is massive and wide open.

With 3.1 million+ people working in accounting and thousands of firms to sell into, you're not fighting over the same 500 accounts as every other AI startup. Most of these firms haven't been pitched a real AI solution yet. This is greenfield territory with real urgency behind it - and Basis has a massive head start.

Cold outbound actually lands. Referrals work. And Basis already has traction with many of the top 100 firms in the US. There's no true pure-play competitor in AI accounting right now. Basis is the clear market leader.

And word of mouth among the top 300 firms is strong - these firm leaders all talk to each other, and Basis is becoming the name that keeps coming up.

The deal sizes are serious.

This isn't $20K ARR land-and-expand. Basis is signing 6, 7, and 8-figure deals - including 7-figure deals in under 6 months. And their pilot conversion rate is 100%. One hundred percent. When prospects try the product, they buy. That's the kind of stat that makes quota feel very different.

The backing is generational.

Basis just closed a $100M Series B from Accel and Google Ventures at a $1.2B valuation - one of the largest Series B rounds for any applied AI company (for context, Harvey's series B was $80M with a $715M valuation). On top of the Series A led by Khosla with Nat Friedman, Jeff Dean, Adam D'Angelo, Claire Hughes Johnson, and the rest of that stacked cap table. Plus the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list.

This is not a "let's see if we can make payroll" situation. Basis has sights set on being a $100B+ company, and they have the capital, the network, and the traction to back it up.

The career upside is real.

Joining a team at this stage, with this trajectory, is how you go from AE to sales leader in 2-3 years instead of 7. You're not a cog in a 500-person sales org. You're building the playbook. You're in the room.

When this company scales (and it will), the people who were there early get the titles, the equity upside, and the resume line that opens every door after.

You'll actually be set up to succeed.

Most companies slap "AI" on their marketing and call it a day. Basis has an entire internal team (Atlas) dedicated to making their own employees 100x more productive with agents. They're practicing what they preach.

And on the post-sale side, there's a dedicated Deployed Intelligence team that handles implementation, user enablement, and acts as a strategic thought partner for how firms optimize process, team structure, and strategy around AI. You're not selling and then leaving the customer to figure it out. There's a real team behind you making sure the product lands. That matters when you're the one putting your name on the deal.

You can go sell another CRM to SaaS companies. Fight over the same accounts as 30 other vendors. Pray that your "AI feature" is differentiated enough to get a callback.

Or you can sell AI agents to a $145B industry that's running out of people, where the buyers already know they have the problem, where you're closing 7-figure deals with no real competition, and where the company you're joining just hit unicorn status.

That's Basis.

If you're interested, check out their open roles or DM me and I'll make an intro.