Long before the start of Materia.ai, co-founders Kevin Merlini and Lucas Adams were already building products that leverage artificial intelligence to materially reduce manual labor and human review and Kevin had even started his career in audit itself. Having worked together at Facebook, where they led the product and engineering teams for news and Integrity, Kevin and Lucas were uniquely positioned to tackle a pressing need in the accounting industry: augmenting human expertise with cutting-edge technology to boost productivity by a step function. 

A little over a year ago, when they shared their vision for an agentic AI platform designed to give every CPA their own staff-level co-pilot, we saw the potential immediately. Increased regulatory + tax law complexity had led towards an ever increasing demand for accounting services, however the US is facing a national shortage of accounting professionals. CPAs are retiring at an accelerated pace and the number of new CPAs entering the workforce does not fill the gap (-30% since 2016). These tailwinds combined with the rapid advancements in LLMs + open source models created an amazing market opportunity. 

It was a privilege to co-lead Materia.ai’s seed round alongside our friends at Thomson Reuters, Spark Capital, Haystack Ventures, and many others amazing investors. Working closely with the team, we experienced firsthand their commitment to becoming the industry standard AI solution for enterprise accounting firms. We were also able to build a strong relationship with the Thomson Reuters leadership team and have been extremely impressed with their level of sophistication and proactiveness around embracing AI across the business. Their acquisition into Thomson Reuters, while sooner than expected, is a testament to the amount of trust and customer love the Materia has built with their team and their product. We believe this partnership will accelerate the adoption of AI-driven accounting solutions from the Top 20 firms to the SMB firms, unlocking tremendous value for professionals in a sector where demand is surging and the workforce is shrinking.

To Kevin, Lucas, and the entire Materia team—thank you for letting us be part of your mission - we’re excited to see how this will transform accounting and bring forward an agentic future into financial services.