In this episode of Accounting Technology Lab, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, CITP, CGMA, provide an insider look at the 2026 AICPA/CPA.com Startup Accelerator cohort, highlighting five emerging companies shaping the future of accounting technology.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript
(Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS
Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab brought to you by CPA practice advisor, with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley. Hi everybody. It’s Brian working hard at the lab today, but I thought I would let you know that do have a quick announcement. We have a giveaway. We’re going to be giving away one Rico scan, snap IX, 2500 receipt edition. We’re going to draw. We’re gonna make the drawing right after April 30. No purchase required. Suggested Retail value, $599 this is a one has one touch simplicity, and our friends at Rico graciously provided it to us with automatic invoice, OCR, detachable receipt guide for small and curl documents and lightning fast, 45 page a minute, duplex scanning. It transforms paperwork into clean, searchable digital data in seconds. If you want to register, it’s CPA te.ch/scan snap. The rules are at CPA te.ch/rules and the privacy policy is at CPA, te.ch, forward, slash, scanner, dash, privacy. And for those of you attending the video, attending the video version of this, I’ve actually put on the screen now a QR code that you can capture and use to register for the for the again, for the scanner. Giveaway again. We’re giving one away. We’re going to give it away again right after April 30 and again you must, you must be an accounting professional when all the rules again are at CPA te CH, CPA te.ch/rules so anyway, with that, thanks for joining us, and here we are back in the lab.
Randy Johnston 01:40
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, and through the years, we’ve assisted the AICPA, cpa.com division on their startup accelerators, and I had the privilege of being at the convening days in New York City recently for the 2026 cohort. Now the program’s been running was started nine years ago, so this was the ninth cohort, or the 10th year. And, you know, is a delight to be in New York City. And Brian said that you couldn’t be there this time. But you know, it’s we learn from all of these different vendors as we go. Now, it turns out that a number of notable players from cpa.com were in the room. Many of you know, Eric askerson from his town hall broadcast every week, or Lisa Simpson, who’s also on the AICPA town calls on a regular basis, both participated in the events, but so did other key players, like Kim Blasco, who’s in charge of Cas, as well as Brandon all free, who’s the in charge of tax. And then you also had vendela Hale, who’s the lead manager on the alliances. And we had the COO, Patrick banar, and we had Michael surround me, who’s the EVP of strategic alliances, as well as Todd Cooper, who did the channels and so forth. In fact, Brian, I think you’ve got a picture of all of these different people that were there. So we did take a picture of everybody. And then Khalil merhib was there, who’s the EVP of growth in professional services, Tom hood participated, and last but not least, I don’t believe I missed anything, is Michelle Thacker, who’s on the lower right side of the picture, who is the Senior Director of alliances. And really between vendela and Michelle, they were largely running the event. Now also in the picture, you can see that there were a number of us who were third party consultants that were invited in, including Brian Davis, who’s the CEO of one stop CPA is and a frequent listener to our podcast. He actually showed me a vibe coded act, and Brian is kind of in the back next to me. And after the picture was taken, he showed me all the wonderful apps he’s developed. So hey, Brian, glad to have you listen again today. But also, Ellen Choi, who is an AI consultant, Irfan dosani is in the group here as well. He’s kind of at the back there, but we’ve had Irfan in a prior episode here. Kimberly Ellison Taylor participated, as well as Caitlin Liu, who’s the head of partnerships from tabs, who was in the accelerator last year. And then last but not least was Dan Luthy of Ignite spot accounting in Utah. Now one omission, because she’s the one that sent me the picture, so I kind of held it in the green is Emily Remington, who’s the director of the audit programs. So I wanted to make sure that you knew, and I’ve really tried to name almost everybody in the picture, except for the various vendors and products. So I’m just going to run those pretty quickly, because it’s important that you know who they are. You’ve got adaptive who has a construction product, so you can see pictured Matt calbano and Cole Meyer. Also, you’ve got audit Pro and long term friend and associate, Peyton, Brian and Paige, you know, pages in the front there who were with confirmation and Peyton had developed a legal system that was acquired by confirmation before they were acquired by Thompson Reuters. Then you had the kitsugi folks. And you know, I’m next to some of those guys over there, but they’re the new tax product with Paige and backna and Jeff Gibson. And then you had ping assistant, Camden bean and Chad Holmes, and I had the pleasure of having dinner with them at Gallagher’s, a fine event. And I had Michael ceramy and Dan was there. And we had vendela is there as well. And then truss in the front there with both Dan Pink House, and Zach manda sell, who lives in Knoxville with you, and I know you talk to him pretty regularly. So I think Brian, it is wise that you know, just we met in the traditional room. So I took this picture of the startup accelerator group, and you can see there are five companies that were put into this program. So what I’d like to do in today’s episode is summarize rather quickly the what happened in the event and how things flowed without malaying any confidences here, the accelerator program has been an investment by the AICPA and cpa.com and new startups to try to innovate across the profession in several different areas. So first up is adaptive, and in this particular case, you know Matt spoke for the group, and you and I have interviewed Matt before. I knew you would remember that, but adaptive is an AI native accounting platform for construction. And he and Cole and I talked extensively about what they’re doing. Adaptive is selling some direct but they’re building up their CPA firm channel for client accounting services. At this point, they’re running 1000 customers with 41 CPA partners. Almost all of these groups have raised capital, except for trust. Trust is completely privately funded so far, but adaptive has raised $26 million they have built their product around being project based, and they have a lot of budget and cost revenues, and they also connect to third party products like Procore. Their most recent innovation was in voice agents. And the reason you might want to work with adaptive is they clearly understand construction and construction client accounting services. They help you scale your practice, and they can give you differentiated, differentiated advisory services with work in process and financial reporting in construction. Very interesting little company. We’ve known about them for a while, and they are being successful. So next up was Kintsugi. Now I sat next to the Kintsugi guys, and it was fascinating to talk to Pujan, whose father actually helped originate Avalara sales tax. It was like old home week because he had to take a picture with me to send it ad. And you know, I appreciated that. But you know, as Jeff and Poojan and I talked, it was pretty clear that these guys had great background, because pushon had actually worked at meta and developed some of the fundamentals for open AI and intellectual property. So pretty interesting guy on that flight, and Jeff had helped at botley and Atlassian and CloudFlare, helping get those companies public. So it’s not their first rodeo, if you will, but they decided to tackle sales tax as a data problem, but much different than all the other players who are trying to, you know, tackle it as a, you know, a regulatory slash, geo located type of problem. So they started in 2023 most recently, they’ve been processing the order of 170 million transactions. They’ve got 630 customers on the platform with $29 million raised, and they’ve processed about 12 and a half billion of sales tax. Now, I asked them what their maximum volume was, and right now, they’ve hit about 3000 transactions per second. They’re growing well, with 150 employees. They intend to be global. They’re already handling sales tax in 100 plus companies. And. And they have a very large growth forecast, 5 million in revenue last year. They think they’ll do 20 million here in 2026 and 70 million in 2027 but when we talked about establishing Nexus and doing sales tax audits and so forth, it was really quite stunning. They did identify that there were 681 sales tax changes in 2025 and you know, Brian, how we’ve talked about, you know, states, county, cities, special, you know, stadium taxes and so forth in the past, and that’s
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:37
before we even consider the geographic boundary changes in every jurisdiction that happened because of annexations and all kinds of things. So it’s that is, you know, that’s one of those markets that is, you know, the devil is definitely in the details,
Randy Johnston 10:55
definitely in the details. And they pointed out things that people get wrong in sales tax, because they stated that regulators don’t forget. And I thought that was an interesting statement, because they illustrated, and there were several that illustrated, Brian actually gave them the source on this. But you know, a company that had been not collecting sales tax properly in Florida decided to cure and file a sales tax return, and all of a sudden they had a million in revenue. And you know, state of Florida says, is this number right? Because you just don’t go from zero to a million. And so they were looking for their back tax there. But the regulators do not forget that there’s a whole lot of this collection and remitting, but a whole lot of people over collect and then they pay it on to the state. But this is a case where if you don’t pay the state, or you don’t return to the company, it’s a prison sentence. You know, you’ve talked about that before. So also collecting the wrong jurisdiction is common, and that the penalties compound quickly, often 25 to 30% penalties. So they believe that they’ve built a platform that gives modern compliance across five pillars, exposure, monitoring, accurate calculations, registrations and filings, which that automation is stunningly well done. They’re doing deep integration, and they’ve got human support. So the product’s only been out a little over a year. They started selling in July of 2024 so they’re new. There would be a little bit of risk that way, but I think with this company, it might be good risk. So that turns us then Brian to ping assistant. Now we’ve also talked to ping in the past. You may remember our discussion with Camden being CEO and co founder, and again, I had dinner with Camden and Chad. And you know, both of these guys are have had LDS emissions. I felt bad for Camden because his was on the Gold Coast in Australia and Brisbane, and he never got to go in the ocean the whole two years because of liability restrictions. You know, kind of fascinating. But Chad also was fancy fund because he went to Spain and we talked paella. You and I both know what that means to Dr Bob, our associate for so long. But more important than the guy’s backgrounds was what ping does now. Camden, by the way, was the first unpaid intern at Divi, which was acquired by bill.com so Divi spend and expense product. That’s him, and he’s a son of a CPA also. So what they have believed that they’ve built is a firm, intelligence platform for modern advisory firms. And, you know, Chad was involved with Docker, so he has a lot of technical background. Of course, you use Docker for a lot of things, Brian, but the whole idea here is that they have an individual executor for an advisor, and then they have a firm management now, this is not just a transcription tool, because there’s lots of those out there. Obviously, you and I use them all the time with otter and others, but they’ve got a meeting assistant, email assistant and client memory, and they hate the word CRM. They consider CRM a four letter word, but it builds a profile on clients with AI workflows, so they’ll capture things like cash flow concerns or offhand comments or client complaints, and they build this tribal knowledge which becomes institutional memory for your firms. The context stays with the firms. When people leave, you get pretty much instant recall. Those things are all good, and it keeps the service consistent, they have integrated with anchor to do change orders in their platform. And of course, we’ve talked about anchor in other accounting technology lab, but it’s pretty easy to start on this. It’s really an advisory only platform. Form with very minimal it lift again. I’m trying to just give you a rapid overview of what these new accelerator products look like. You’ll see them at events in another podcast. Now, one that we’ve covered in the past is truss. Now, truss is one of the many portals in the market. They were the only business selected that did not raise outside money. They’re basically self funded. Today, they’re supporting about 450 firms with 30 employees, and they’re growing at 350% plus, you know, very good growth rate. Their deal is tax workflow, from intake to work papers to prep to delivery, and they can do CAS and audit as well. And the key things that they’re doing, and actually demonstrated for us was some new agentic AI, how they have been partnering with many different players in a new strategic partner ecosystem that they are really moving from beyond compliance to advisory workflows, and they demonstrated some of those to us, including their intelligence guided workflows and the very deep client insights that they have Inside the platform so they may be able to provide higher value relationships, which is part of the reason I like them so well. And I talked to Dan and Zach pretty frequently. And of course, Ken there right developer. Guy behind it really is smart guy. Well, last but not least was pro AI and Peyton spoke for this. Now, Peyton actually was an auditor at Goodman, which became Dixon Hughes Goodman, and you know, so on in the rollout, but we knew Peyton from again, the confirmation day, along with page. Now, when Peyton was an auditor, he primarily audit construction and government, and he named some other industries. But back in 2012 seems like forever, 14 years ago, he created legal.com and then he moved to Nashville, acquired by confirmation.com about 10 years ago. So the audit pro product, he started in 2024 and that particular product guides auditors through an entire financial statement audit. And the value proposition for them is quite straightforward. They’re AI native. They have a very simple user interface, very intuitive. They believe that they can get immediate value realization, and they’re very affordable, at $199 per auditor, and some of the AI based reporting that they demonstrated was just stunning. And you know, if you do audits, prep, comp review, and you’re looking for just a way to automate the workflow, audit Pro is of pretty fascinating offering in that light. Now, I ran through all the products here just to try to give a sense of this. And you know, Brian, I think we’ll stop and do for a minute is just pontificate or reflect on the event itself. Again, I’ve had the privilege of working with many of the predecessor accelerator cohorts, and you have to And fundamentally, you know, the AICPA has a vetting process where they select from hundreds of applicants and narrow it down to a few. The numbers varied from five to about eight at the top end. But then what they do is they bring the recipients in to New York. They provide background on accounting profession and marketing strategies and so forth. And then on the second day or and then, usually the evening of, we do a dinner event where you get to have, you know, one on one time, talking with many different people, the lunches and breaks and so forth, same thing on the first day, and then on the second day, they basically have an in depth presentation from every product. That’s why you heard me in this podcast, kind of talk about the products, because I was just trying to recall for you what I observed. Now, in future podcasts, we’ll dig, dig deep on many of these tools, but the net here is that they present to us for an hour, we suggest strategies, and then they record B rolls for promotion in the studio of the AICPA line. I was pleased to build relationships with all 10 of the people from the different companies, many I’ve had in the past. You have to and learn about what they were doing and why. But overall, that’s kind of the lay of the land. And you know, again, good use of time. Yes, innovative platforms, yes. If you’re interested in, you know, learning more about any of those, you could reach out to the companies directly. So Brian, what questions do you have or comments that you might have for our listeners?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:15
It’s an interesting Randy. It’s an interesting cohort, and it is. I’ve noticed that these tools seem to be quite a bit more narrow than some of the tools we’ve seen in the past. You know, it’s, they’re not trying to solve everything. They’re trying to solve fairly narrow product problems. You know, I’m quite impressed with every one of them. They all have an entry. They all have interesting stories. It’s, I think it’s going to be an interesting We’re in. We’re living in variant you know, I hate to use, I hate to overuse the word interesting, but we are living in interesting times. We have more change going on in the space, more change going on in workflows, than any time I’ve seen, probably, except for maybe when we had the initial computerization of a lot of applications.
Speaker 1 21:01
But realistically, it is every bit as big
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 21:05
as when 10 keys get thrown out the window. So it’s interesting times. It’ll be interesting to see how, you know what, how these find places in the marketplace. You know, it’s, I think, the AI audit applications, you know, that’s a pretty thick space right now with, you know, with, you know, the marks company out of the UK, and you know the AICPA audit plan, audit items, and, you know, again, so many data driven tools. You look at construction, that’s, I think that’s going to have quite a few legs. I think trust has got legs. You know, the numbers they’re putting up are pretty impressive. You know, sales tax is always going to be difficult, and I’m excited about having viable competitors to Avalara to keep them honest on pricing. And, you know, again, firm level AI is an important thing. Now, is that going to get solved by Claude before ping can get market share? I don’t know, but I’m very glad to see I’m very glad to see folks coming at it, and I think it’s, I think it’s reassuring that we have many very detailed solutions focused on our profession to solve these problems,
Randy Johnston 22:21
we did ask that question about competitive moat protection from the large language models as an example. So again, try not to violate any confidences behind the scenes there. But it’s a pretty big deal to you know, have these companies with of the five, many of them already have significant revenue streams, and because of that, I’m more comfortable than normal calling out that you could almost adopt any of the five and be relatively safe in your adoption right now. So you know that’s a big deal. Well, Brian, I know I wanted to cover this while it was still top of mindset. And I appreciate you letting me rant for a while on this one, because I think it is important to the profession. And as you know, friends, we’ll be back with you on leading technologies for the accounting profession in another accounting Technology Lab. You have a good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:19
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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