Ascend has made its largest merger transaction to date, adding Miami-based accounting and advisory firm KSDT to its platform, effective Sept. 1.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. KSDT adds five offices, 29 partners, and 276 total professionals to Ascend’s footprint in the Southeast. KSDT is among the top 150 largest accounting firms in the U.S. by revenue, bringing in $38.1 million during its most recent fiscal year, according to INSIDE Public Accounting.
In addition, KSDT’s India team will integrate into Ascend’s offshore captive, Sentient Solutions for Accounting, a global accounting services and technology solutions provider based in Hyderabad.
Backed by private equity firm Alpine Investors, Ascend partners with regional accounting firms but allows them to stay independent while providing the firms resources to help them grow. The partner firms relinquish their traditional partnership structures in order to join Ascend’s platform.
Ascend provides access to growth capital, talent acquisition and training, management resources, best-of-breed technology, artificial intelligence tools, an offshore captive, shared back-office services, a catalytic leadership system, and modernized equity incentives to its partner firms.
Since launching in January 2023, nearly 20 regional accounting firms have restructured in order to join the Ascend platform.
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Founded in 1976, KSDT is known as a people-first firm that’s dedicated to helping business owners achieve their financial goals, freeing them to focus on running their business, serving their clients, and helping their employees live better.
“Ascend is the partner we’ve been waiting for, one that matches our ambition without asking us to be anyone but ourselves,” KSDT CEO Jeffrey Taraboulos said in a statement. “We built KSDT on a simple idea: take extraordinary care of people and the growth will follow. This merger lets us do that at a bigger scale and a faster pace with more opportunity for our team, more capability for our clients, and more room to build the kind of firm our industry needs. We’re keeping our culture, our personality, and our entrepreneurial spirit, and adding the technology, resources, and national reach to accelerate everything that makes KSDT special. This is about honoring the legacy we’ve built and multiplying it. Our best work and our biggest impact starts now.”
KSDT is a full-service CPA firm that provides a line of professional services to clients that include tax, advisory, assurance, accounting, litigation, and wealth management.
“Of the more than 40,000 public accounting firms in the United States, fewer than a handful have climbed into the profession’s top 200 in a single generation. KSDT is among that small group, and it is clear to us what makes the firm exceptional—leadership that sets a high bar and connects work to purpose, a culture that aspires to be the best workplace for the best people, and a vibrant middle-market in South Florida that has taken to the firm’s fiercely independent roots and personal, context-rich service,” said Ascend President Nishaad Ruparel. “These are special qualities, and we are building Ascend so that the team at KSDT can compound their unique momentum for generations.”
“It’s an honor to have a firm of KSDT’s caliber join and strengthen Ascend,” added David Wurtzbacher, founder and CEO of Ascend. “Their entrepreneurial, service-oriented spirit, which has led to their success in one of the most significant markets in the U.S., is a perfect fit for the Ascend model. We amplify what is special about the strong, regional, independent firm with the resources, technology, and collaboration of a top 25 firm.”
As is common in private equity deals with CPA firms, KSDT has adopted an alternative practice structure separating non-attest and attest services. Tax and business advisory services are provided by a new entity affiliated with Ascend. Attest services are provided by an independently owned and licensed CPA firm.
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