Basis's Matt Harpe on building agentic AI for accounting's staffing crisis
Key takeaways from Upstarts Media interview with Basis co-founder and CEO Matt HarpeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (July 2026):
$1.15B valuation. Basis recently raised $100M at a $1.15B valuation. It is now used by roughly 30% of the top 25 US accounting firms and about 25% of the top 150.
Solving an accountant shortage. The US has about 3 million accountants, a number that is declining — roughly 300,000 retired over two years and up to 75% may retire within a decade — while the number of accounting students isn't rising. Basis aims to offset that gap with AI.
Healthcare-to-accounting origin. Harpe, who has no accounting background, came to the problem via machine-learning work on healthcare costs at BCG; he co-founded Basis in 2023 with Mitch Troyanovsky, who studied accounting.
Agents, not a chatbot. Against repeated pressure from investors and customers to ship a simple chatbot for faster traction, Basis bet the company on end-to-end agentic systems that complete full workflows autonomously — reconciliations, journal entries, verification — and present finished work for accountant review.
Reasoning over 'generative'. Harpe argues the key unlock was models' reasoning ability, not text generation, plus applying LLMs in a local, entity-specific context rather than training one global model — accounting varies too much firm to firm.
Outcome-based pricing. Basis deliberately avoided seat-based and token-consumption pricing, holding out for an outcomes-based model tied to the accounting work delivered — a bet Harpe contrasts with the wider market drifting toward token-based consumption.
Defensibility versus the big labs. Harpe argues accounting is unlikely to be won by OpenAI or Anthropic because it isn't a text-in/text-out task — it needs sign-offs, permissions and deep domain integration outside the labs' natural wheelhouse.
Talent magnet in New York. Basis positions itself as a home for applied ML researchers and engineers in NYC — most with no accounting background — competing for talent with the likes of Ramp and Modal.
Read more: Reuters
