Like many of his fellow accountants, Jing Zhang has tried to quit the industry many times due to the boredom of the monotonous work. That was until 2020, when the accounting profession was undergoing a mass exodus of talent, when he had the idea to build software that could automate the more mundane aspects of the job. As a result, Fieldguide has been around since before the rise of ChatGPT, but its artificial intelligence-native approach has been boosted by the success of generative AI.
Field Guide on Monday announced a $75 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives’ Growth Equity Group with participation from new investor Geodesic Capital and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, and Thomson Reuters, valuing the company at $700 million.
“Audits may seem boring on the surface, but the purpose behind them is actually very noble and important to the business world,” said Chan. “We are replacing a fragmented technology stack.”
the future of accounting
As Chang says, the certified public accountant (CPA) industry is facing a talent crisis. “And the situation is only going to get worse,” he said. luck. “I call it existential.” The number of CPA exam takers is at its lowest in 17 years, and more than 75% of current CPAs are expected to retire in the next 10 years, according to Field Guide. However, the work of accounting firms is essential to many large companies, such as auditing the quarterly financial reports prepared by publicly traded companies.
Chang previously worked at Atrium, an AI-powered law firm founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, which closed in 2020. Chang had a similar idea of using AI to automate accounting operations, but instead of building the next generation of accounting firms, he decided to take a software approach. Many large companies have decades-long relationships with accounting firms, he reasoned. Rather than rebuilding that trust from scratch, they could work with the accounting firms themselves.
Fieldguide initially found it difficult to find traction with an AI-native approach. But over time, the sudden popularity of large-scale language models from OpenAI and Anthropic validated the company’s decision to build its business for an AI-native world. Over the past 18 months, Field Guide has begun to achieve product-market fit, Chan said.
“That’s when I started to sense that the CPA industry as a whole was not only receptive, but had a huge appetite,” he said. Today, Fieldguide is used by half of the top 100 US accounting firms, including KPMG, with varying degrees of agent tool adoption.
According to Chang, Fieldguide’s AI agents are effectively acting as an extended team of U.S. CPAs, replacing functions typically outsourced to offshore companies in countries like India and the Philippines. This may also include testing the revenue figures in the financial statements. Plan how to conduct the audit based on the client’s industry. Create the steps your audit team must go through. “Rather than offshoring the work, our AI agents perform the first pass of the work, and then a human comes in and reviews the results,” Chan said. “What we rely on our experts to do is interpret the results, freeing up their time to do more value-added work and building trust with our customers.”
With Fieldguide, traditional 10-person audit teams could be replaced with three-person audits within the next few years, Chang said, and soon its agents will be able to perform higher-level strategic thinking. He argued that rather than replacing jobs, automation would help accelerate the careers of junior auditors, saying: “There will be less burnout in the industry because the work becomes more interesting at the senior level.”
Goldman’s bet on AI
Darren Cohen, global co-head of growth equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, said his team is tracking a variety of areas that could have interesting fits with AI, including accounting. They also spent time interacting with Field Guide customers and had been following Field Guide for about two years before deciding to come on board as a Series C lead investor. “Clients have seen a 30% to 40% increase in efficiency,” he said. luck. “This is really a great case study in the application of AI. It’s not just a large language model, it’s a purpose-built model designed for a specific use case.”
Cohen argued that Fieldguide’s pre-ChatGPT history helps explain its success at a time when many startups are racing to take advantage of this novel technology. “They were deep into the field, so they were able to grab that advantage,” he said, adding that Chan’s accounting background gave him a “fundamental understanding” of the industry’s inefficiencies. “We want people to be deeply committed to their mission.”
Fieldguide currently has 160 employees and plans to double that number next year. Chang said the company’s staff is now made up of 25% former auditors and continues to add both engineers and certified public accountants. “We are combining the best of both Silicon Valley AI engineering and subject matter expertise directly from the field,” said Chang.
While a strategic acquisition by an accounting firm may seem like the most logical outcome for Field Guide, Cohen said he is hopeful that an initial public offering can be achieved. “My ideal world would be for them to achieve their vision,” he said. “They’re expanding their business across a number of different areas, including audit, tax and accounting. They end up with very large businesses that can go public when they’re ready to go public.”
