Materia has recently emerged from stealth with $6.3 million in funding from investors including Spark Capital, Haystack Ventures, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Exponent Capital, and the Allen Institute for AI. The company currently has five customers, ranging from top 100 to top 15 accounting firms in the U.S. Merlini, who left a short career in accounting due to its drudgery, believes that the advances in AI can address the existing problems in the accounting industry.
Key takeaways:
- The U.S. is experiencing a shortage of accountants, partly due to the large amount of tedious work involved in the profession.
- Materia, a company co-founded by Kevin Merlini, aims to alleviate this burden by integrating into a firm’s existing workflow software to automate and augment the mundane parts of an accounting audit.
- Materia uses generative AI platforms like OpenAI to process information from a firm’s documents, and has emerged from stealth with $6.3 million in funding.
- The company is targeting the top 200 accounting firms in the U.S. with plans to move downstream in the future.