Abacus, which is making agentic CPA assistants for modern accounting firms, today announced it has raised $6.6 million in seed funding. Of course, the company said it is using AI to create assistants for CPAs, not replace the CPAs themselves.
Still, it’s time for every worker to look over their shoulder and see if their assistant might replace them someday. And for tax accountants, the day has come.
The round was led by Menlo Ventures, with significant participation from Pear VC and participation from Recall Capital, and Original Capital.
The funding will accelerate Abacus’ mission to give CPAs superpowers — turning junior-level preparers into reviewers and bringing Big Four-level automation and efficiency to the entire CPA market. The intelligent assistants learn firm-specific workflows and take on the rote, high-volume tasks that slow teams down.
Founded by brothers Cody Sugarman (CEO) and Brandon Sugarman (CTO), both engineers from Stanford, Abacus brings an AI-first approach to modernizing how accounting firms operate.
I asked them whether the CPA AI assistants might put real accountants out of work. The founders replied, “Our goal is to 10x the productivity of tax professionals by unburdening them from the mindless parts of their day-to-day. This will change the nature of the role, but we expect the increased efficiency to unlock new opportunities for both new talent (where there is already a massive labor shortage) and existing professionals (who can now spend time on higher-value, client facing tasks).”
As accounting firms face mounting pressure from shrinking headcount and growing client demands, Abacus helps teams stay efficient, eliminating repetitive manual work while maintaining the precision and control tax firms need.
“With fewer professionals entering the field and workloads rising, the accounting industry is under immense pressure,” said Cody Sugarman, in a statement. “We’re seeing an explosion of BPO usage, but associates are still working 60+ hour weeks during the busy seasons to meet the April and October deadlines. We’re building software that doesn’t just automate tasks—it works alongside teams, adapts to how they operate, and scales with their complexity. This funding allows us to expand our platform and bring this new category of assistant to more firms across the industry.”
Abacus is starting where the impact is highest: automating data entry, the most expensive and time-consuming task in the tax preparation process. Today, tax associates spend up to 80% of their time on manual rote tasks like data collection and reconciliation, and preparing workpapers before a CPA ever sees the return.
With fewer professionals entering the field and increasing pressure on delivery timelines, many firms are turning to offshore teams, paying $30 or more per return and facing long turnaround times during peak season, the company said.
“The idea for Abacus came from our own CPA issuing us a ‘7216 consent form’, essentially telling us that the bulk of our tax prep work was going to be offshored,” said Brandon Sugarman, in a statement. “This sparked a curiosity in the industry and eventually led to our first paying customer.”
The platform automates data collection by pulling from client documents, past returns, and standard forms—no 7216 consent form required—and classifies, reconciles, and pushes data directly into CPA workflows for review and filing. What once took hours of back-and-forth and manual entry can now be done 10x faster and at a fraction of the cost, with no bottlenecks during crunch time.
“Accounting is one of the last major service industries still bogged down by 30-year old legacy systems and manual workflows,” said Croom Beatty, partner at Menlo Ventures, in a statement. “With more than half of accountants expected to retire in the next decade, there is an acute need for AI to reshape and improve how modern accounting gets done. Cody and Brandon have a deep understanding of the intricacies and nuances of how accounting firms operate and have built a powerful tax product that allows best in class accounting firms to better serve their end customers.”
