The accounting industry is staring down a demographic cliff that no amount of manual spreadsheet-jockeying can fix. With 75% of CPAs reaching retirement age and a dwindling pipeline of new graduates, the “Big Four” and regional powerhouses are facing an existential expertise gap.
Accordance, a San Francisco-based startup that emerged from stealth just six months ago, thinks the answer isn’t more billable hours, it’s more compute.
Today, the company announced its AI platform has officially ingested over 10 million global tax law data points. More importantly, that data is being put to work. Accordance is now processing thousands of specialized professional queries daily and has nabbed 8 leading accounting & tax firms on the U.S. West Coast including Abbott, Stringham & Lynch, Perkins & Co, and Wright Ford Young & Co.
The “Multi-Agent” Advantage
Most “AI for Business” tools are little more than thin wrappers around OpenAI or Anthropic models. Accordance is a different beast. Founded by alumni of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), the team has built what they call a Multi-Agent Orchestrator.
Instead of asking a single model to “guess” a tax answer, a recipe for disaster in a highly litigious field, Accordance’s system decomposes complex queries into a hierarchy of tasks. One agent might be assigned to audit 50 states of tax code, while another cross-references international treaties and a third scans real-time public company filings.
“The accounting and tax industries are no longer in the experimental phase of AI; we are in the implementation phase,” says David Yue, CEO and Co-Founder of Accordance. “Seeing thousands of queries flow through our system daily proves that firms are moving past the ‘wow’ factor and trusting Accordance with their most complex advisory and compliance workflows.”
Bridging the 10-Million-Point Gap
The 10 million data points aren’t just a vanity metric. They represent a proprietary library of federal, state, and international codices, court precedents, and even evolving local ordinances. To make this data usable, Accordance built an Intelligent Citation System. Every output comes with clickable, verified references to specific document numbers and URLs.
“The time savings is tremendous. Research that would have taken two, four, or six hours, I can complete in Accordance in 15 or 20 minutes,” said Richard Huffman, Tax Partner, Wright Ford Young & Co. “Now I’m providing more holistic answers to my client and giving them a playbook. I can do all of that in less time than it would take to do the research without Accordance.”
A Silicon Valley Pedigree
The startup’s rapid ascent is backed by a “who’s who” of venture capital. Accordance has raised $13 million in total funding, including a $10M seed round led by Khosla Ventures and a $3M pre-seed led by General Catalyst. The investor list reads like a tech Hall of Fame: Anthropic, Sequoia Capital, NEA, Bain Capital Ventures, and Menlo Ventures.
The involvement of Khosla is a significant signal. Vinod Khosla has long predicted that “agentic” AI, systems that can reason through complex tasks, will eventually replace or augment most high-end professional services. By targeting the “gnarly,” interpretive nature of tax law, Accordance is proving that specialized agents can outperform general-purpose models in high-stakes environments.
The West Coast Land Grab
While the software is global, the company’s recent growth has demonstrated a West Coast dominance. The new roster of partner firms includes:
- Gursey Schneider LLP
- Perkins & Co
- Wright Ford Young & Co
- Lavine, Lofgren, Morris, & Engelberg, LLP
- Abbott, Stringham & Lynch
- Gilbert CPAs
- The Henry Levy Group
- Global Mobility Tax LLP
By embedding itself into these regional players, Accordance is effectively becoming the operating system for the firms that handle the books for Silicon Valley’s wealthiest individuals and fastest-growing startups.
The company is also playing the long game with the talent pipeline, partnering with the USF School of Law and Anthropic to integrate its AI tools into the JD and Graduate Tax curriculum. The message is clear: the next generation of tax professionals won’t be trained to memorize the code; they’ll be trained to orchestrate the AI that knows it better.
