There is a certain sound inside an accounting firm when the deadline clock starts talking. Keyboards accelerate. Coffee turns into strategy. Everyone insists the spreadsheet is stable while it quietly calculates its own rebellion. That pressure point is exactly where Matt Harpe, Co-Founder and CEO, and Mitchell Troyanovsky, Co-Founder, decided to build.
Basis was not created to decorate workflows. It was built to do the work. A team of AI agents that autonomously completes accounting tasks across tax, audit, and core accounting. Agents that run for extended periods, adapt to client nuance, collaborate at critical decision points, and take real action instead of drafting polite suggestions. In a profession where precision is oxygen, that distinction matters.
The market noticed. Basis closed a $100M Series B at a $1.15B valuation in February 2026, led by Accel and GV, with Khosla Ventures participating. Miles Clements does not deploy capital casually. Lloyd Blankfein does not join cap tables out of curiosity. When that level of conviction shows up, it signals that something fundamental is happening in a sector long described as essential, complex, and underserved.
Rewind to October 2023. A $3.6M seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures, alongside BoxGroup and Avid Ventures, brought Basis out of stealth with “Basis Intern” and “Basis Accountant.” The names carried a wink, but the architecture carried weight. Sit alongside the systems firms already use. Close books. Reconcile accounts. Generate workpapers. Move the needle instead of narrating it.
Then December 2024 delivered a $34M Series A led by Khosla Ventures, with Better Tomorrow Ventures, BoxGroup, Avid Ventures, and NFDG backing the vision. NFDG, led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, is not known for underwriting soft technical ambition. That round validated the premise that accounting deserves purpose-built intelligence, not generic copilots.
Today, Basis reports its agents can complete a partnership tax workbook end to end and deliver comprehensive tax returns end to end. FinTech Futures notes the platform supports around 30% of the top 25 accounting firms. No public victory parade. Just a statistic that quietly changes competitive dynamics across the profession.
This is being built in New York, in person, around the corner from Madison Square Park in Flatiron, under the corporate entity Essex Labs Inc. The Series B capital is earmarked to accelerate platform development, deepen agent capability across increasingly complex workflows, and expand engineering and machine learning teams.
So when the intern reconciles, the accountant drafts the workpapers, and the human focuses on CFO advisory and assurance that actually shapes outcomes, what does the modern accounting firm start to look like, and who among them is ready to operate on a new basis?
