UPDATED 08:00 EDT / JULY 10 2025

AI

Abacus raises $6.6M to bring AI assistants to accounting firms

Agentic certified public accountant assistant startup Abacus AI Inc. announced today that it had raised $6.6 million in new funding to give CPAs “superpowers” by turning junior-level preparers into reviewers and bringing Big Four-level automation and efficiency to the entire CPA market.

Founded by brothers Cody and Brandon Sugarman, both engineers from Stanford, Abacus pitches itself as bringing an AI-first approach to modernizing how accounting firms operate. The company’s intelligent assistants learn firm-specific workflows and take on the rote, high-volume tasks that slow teams down.

The agentic offering is designed to assist accounting firms that are facing mounting pressure from shrinking headcounts and growing client demands. Abacus agents assist teams to stay efficient by 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 Chief Executive Officer Cody Sugarman. “We’re building software that doesn’t just automate tasks, it works alongside teams, adapts to how they operate and scales with their complexity.”

Abacus is starting where it claims that its impact can be the highest: automating data entry, which it says is the most expensive and time-consuming task in the tax preparation process. Tax associates spend up to 80% of their time on manual rote tasks like data collection, reconciliation and preparing work papers before a CPA ever sees the return. With increasing staff shortages and the pressure of delivery timelines, many firms are turning to offshore teams, paying $30 or more per return and facing long turnaround times during peak season.

“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 Chief Technology Officer Brandon Sugarman. “This sparked a curiosity in the industry and eventually led to our first paying customer.”

The Abacus platform automates data collection by pulling from client documents, past returns and standard forms, with no 7216 consent form required, and classifies, reconciles and pushes data directly into CPA workflows for review and filing. The net result is what once took hours can now be done 10 times faster and at a fraction of the cost, with no bottlenecks during crunch times.

The seed round was led by Menlo Ventures LP, with Pear VC, Recall Capital and Original Capital also participating.

“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,” said Croom Beatty, a partner at Menlo Ventures. “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.”

Image: Abacus AI

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