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Mesh

Y Combinator LogoW25
Active
finance
productivity
enterprise-software
ai
San Francisco
 
http://www.usemesh.com

Automate outsourced accounting work with AI

Mesh builds domain-specific AI agents to automate repetitive accounting tasks like cash reconciliation, expense wires, and inter-company transactions. Whatever tasks accounting firms are currently outsourcing abroad for reduced labor costs, we automate entirely. At Carta, we spent 5+ years working together to automate accounting. We helped grow Carta's fund accounting business from $20M to $100M, transformed offline excel tasks into automated workflows, and increased customer satisfaction score by over 50% by creating an internal workspace for task coordination. Until now, the only way to scale accounting firms was to hire more employees and outsource more work. With Mesh, accountants can save time on each task, save money on hiring additional resources, and use their extra capacity to exponentially grow their business. With a current shortage of 340,000 accountants in the US, along with the alarming statistic that 75% of certified public accountants (CPAs) will reach retirement within the next 15 years, AI has a critical role to play. And we want to be the ones to automate this $63bn outsourced accounting and finance industry. Our AI agents work long hours, so accountants don't need to.
Mesh
Founded:2024
Team Size:2
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Group Partner:Michael Seibel
 
Active Founders

Erin Kim, Founder

Co-Founder + CEO @ Mesh Building the best AI bookkeeper. Previously at Carta, Barclays IB, and Econ at WashU.
Erin Kim
Erin Kim
Mesh
 

Nandini Ramakrishnan, Founder

Co-Founder + CTO @ Mesh Building the best AI bookkeeper. Previously at Carta, eBay, ECE at CMU.
Nandini Ramakrishnan
Nandini Ramakrishnan
Mesh
 
Company Launches
Mesh - AI Agent for Bank Reconciliation
See original launch post ›

Hey YC!

We’re Erin & Nandini, co-founders of @Mesh. We’ve worked together on accounting automation for 5+ years at Carta. Our mission is to democratize financial automation to all operationally driven accounting firms, so that they can scale without outsourcing.

TL;DR

  • ⚠️ Accounting firms are outsourcing due to a shortage of accountants, but outsourcing often involves potential delays + errors, onboarding + training, and data security risks
  • 🏦 A core recurring function that gets outsourced is reconciliation of bank transactions
  • ✒️ Mesh offers an AI agent that can auto-reconcile thousands of transactions within minutes

https://youtu.be/AanVh5W7zpo

Problem

There’s a mass shortage of accountants, and it’s predicted that 75% of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) are going to retire in the next 15 years. Meanwhile, the demand for accounting services isn’t going down. To keep up with this mismatched supply and demand, accounting firms often have to tap into outsourced talent abroad in order to cost effectively scale and service more clients.

However, outsourcing often involves onboarding / training, potential delays and errors, communication challenges, and data security risks. The immediate cost savings on labor might incur costs in other areas of the business, impacting overall efficiency.

So, we asked – can we build agents to automate some of these outsourced tasks? And if so, what is the first task that will have the biggest impact on time savings?

Accountants need to import and map hundreds, if not thousands, of bank transactions against the Chart of Accounts (COA) to balance the books every month. It’s a tedious, but necessary, exercise that involves:

Some of this is partially automated if you’re incorporating a modern tech stack (i.e. Brex, Ramp). But when you’re a service provider, you often don’t have control over your clients’ banking choices and need to operate across multiple bank accounts and thousands of transactions. Even within a single organization, the same problem arises if you’re operating across multiple bank accounts, especially in a high transaction-volume business.

Solution

The above process is full of opportunities to streamline, but we’re starting with mapping transactions to the right COA step for a few reasons:

  • It’s the most time-consuming step.
  • Our prospects are already outsourcing this exact task (and not having the best experience)
  • It’s a perfect use case for LLM in accounting.

Our goal is to seamlessly embed within existing processes and tech stack that accountants currently use. Most of the accounting world still mainly relies on some combination of Excel / Google Sheets, Quickbooks, Xero, and Netsuite. With that in mind, we built a plug-and-play reconciliation tool that gets the job done with just 3 steps:

  1. Upload your COA (if you’ve previously uploaded, we’ll retrieve & skip this step)
  2. Upload your transactions
  3. Review + export the AI-reconciled transactions

Our Ask

We’re looking to chat with accountants at different firms to better understand the similarities + differences in their workflows. Please connect us at erin.kim@usemesh.com to any:

  • Accounting firms (i.e. fund administration, tax, bookkeeping, audit)
  • Fractional CFOs who offer bookkeeping / monthly close services
  • In-house controllers (at companies + funds)

We can’t wait to help them save time & money.

– Erin & Nandini