Like many of his fellow accountants, Jin Chang tried to quit the industry several times because of the tedium of grunt work. That was until 2020, when he had the idea to build software that could automate the more banal aspects of the job at a time when the accounting profession was hemorrhaging talent. The result, Fieldguide, predated the rise of ChatGPT, though its artificial intelligence-native approach was buoyed by the success of generative AI.
On Monday, Fieldguide announced a $75 million funding round led by the growth equity group at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, valuing the company at $700 million, with participation from new investor Geodesic and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, and Thomson Reuters.
“Auditing, on its surface, might seem boring, but actually the purpose behind what they do is quite noble and important for the business world,” said Chang. “We are replacing a fragmented technology stack.”
The future of accounting
As Chang puts it, the certified public accounting, or CPA, industry is going through a talent crisis. “And it’s only getting worse,” he told Fortune. “I would call it existential.” The number of candidates writing the CPA exam is at a 17-year-low, with more than 75% of today’s CPAs expected to retire over the next decade, according to Fieldguide. The work of accounting firms, however, is essential for many larger businesses, such as auditing the quarterly financial reports produced by public companies.
Chang’s previous job was at the AI-powered legal firm Atrium, created by Twitch cofounder Justin Kan, which shut down in 2020. Chang had a similar idea to use AI to automate accounting work, but decided to take a software approach rather than building the next generation accounting firm. Many of the largest companies, he reasoned, have decades-long relationships with their accounting firms. Rather than rebuild that trust from square one, he could instead work with the accounting firms themselves.
Fieldguide initially found it difficult to find traction with its AI-native approach. In time, though, its decision to build the business for an AI-native world was validated by the sudden popularity of large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Over the last 18 months, Chang said that Fieldguide began to achieve product-market fit.
“That’s when we started sensing the CPA industry overall being not just receptive, but having a heavy appetite,” he said. Today, Fieldguide is used by half of the top 100 U.S. accounting firms, including KPMG, though at different degrees of adoption of its agentic tools.
According to Chang, Fieldguide’s AI agents are replacing functions that are typically outsourced to offshore firms in countries such as India and the Philippines, effectively acting as extended teams to CPAs in the U.S. That can include testing revenue figures in financial statements, planning how to carry out an audit based on a client’s industry, and writing procedures that an audit team needs to go through. “Instead of offshoring the work, our AI agents execute the first pass of the work, then humans come in to review the results,” Chang said. “What we are leaving for expert humans is to interpret the results, and again, free up the time so that they can do more value-added work, which is building trusting client relationships.”
Chang said that with Fieldguide, a traditional 10-person audit team might be able to perform an audit with three people within the next few years, and that soon, its agents will be able to conduct higher-level strategic thinking. Rather than replace jobs, he argued that automation will help junior auditors accelerate their careers. “We will see less burnout in the industry, because the work does get interesting at the more senior levels.”
Goldman’s AI bet
Darren Cohen, the global co-head of growth equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, said that his team has been tracking different verticals that could have interesting fits with AI, including accounting. They had been tracking Fieldguide for around two years before deciding to come on as the lead investor for its Series C, partly after spending time speaking with Fieldguide’s customers. “Clients were getting 30-40% improvements in efficiency,” he told Fortune. “It really is a great case study of applications of AI. It’s not just large language models—it’s purpose-built models designed for the specific use case.”
Cohen argued that Fieldguide’s pre-ChatGPT history, at a moment when many new startups are racing to harness the novel technology, helps explain its success. “They were deep in the domain, and so they were able to seize that advantage” he said, adding that Chang’s background in accounting gave him a “primal understanding” of the inefficiencies in the industry. “You want people to be deeply committed to the mission they’re on.”
Fieldguide currently has 160 employees with plans to double in the next year. The company is currently 25% former auditors, according to Chang, and continues to bulk up on both engineers and CPAs. “We’re combining the best of both Silicon Valley AI engineering and subject matter expertise directly from the field,” Chang said.
Though a strategic acquisition by an accounting firm might seem like the most logical outcome for Fieldguide, Cohen said he’s hopeful that it will achieve an initial public offering. “My ideal world is they achieve their vision,” he said. “They scale it across all these different disciplines: audit, tax, accounting. Eventually it becomes a very big business, and they can take it public when it’s ready to go public.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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