They knew he was a scammer, so they offered him a job. When an engineering interview at Checkr turned suspicious, CEO Daniel Yanisse (@danielyanisse) decided to play along to test his own identity software. My exclusive story on what happened next 👀

They knew he was a scammer, so they offered him a job. When an engineering interview at Checkr turned suspicious, CEO Daniel Yanisse (@danielyanisse) decided to play along to test his own identity software. My exclusive story on what happened next 👀

I got to see 10 mins of this 🧀 doc at a preview last night, and it was so good! Strongly recommend you check it out, if you’re a fan of cheese, fun documentaries, or @EricNewcomer and fam (this should cover everyone) 👇

Matt Harpe and his co-founder Mitchell Troyanovsky faced "a fair amount of skepticism" while building their startup @trybasis. Basis succeeded by going straight to the source — their agents were trained from shadowing actual accountants. This season is presented by @Rippling.

"It’s about building tools for folks who want to do the right thing, and making it easy to do the right thing." We're honored to build Ambrook alongside operators. Thank you @alexrkonrad for covering our Series B in Upstarts:

Exclusive: startup Ambrook has raised a $30M Series B led by investor Lachy Groom. CEO Mackenzie Burnett (@ciaomack) tells Upstarts how she's bringing her expenses and bookkeeping software, already a QuickBook killer for farms, to more of the "real economy," like trucking.

Everyone is a M&A expert today. But if your hot take on Bending Spoons acquiring Airtable doesn’t factor in that it spun out the AI unit, Hyperagent, it’s missing key pieces of the puzzle. Could be where execs and top engineers go, and changes the math on their exit value👇

More fintech funding! @AmbrookAg raised a $30M Series B led by @lachygroom Ambrook offers accounting + financial mgmt software for "real economy" SMBs, starting w/ farms & expanding into trucking, contracting & real estate. They handle bookkeeping, bill pay, cash mgmt & tax/compliance record-keeping, often replacing QuickBooks Some stats on the biz: - 8,000+ business customers, up from 2,500 a year ago - 1,000+ trucking businesses + hundreds of contractors & property mgrs - At least half of customers adopt Ambrook as their first software vendor ever $59M total raised now ($26.1M Series A in July '25)

Exclusive: startup Ambrook has raised a $30M Series B led by investor Lachy Groom. CEO Mackenzie Burnett (@ciaomack) tells Upstarts how she's bringing her expenses and bookkeeping software, already a QuickBook killer for farms, to more of the "real economy," like trucking.

HappyRobot just announced a new raise at a $1.2B valuation 👀 When I wrote about HappyRobot in @UpstartsMediaCo last fall, I was impressed with what @pablorpalafox and his brother were building for logistics. Now they're going wider. Our original story:

How can a vertical AI startup in a category like *accounting* possibly compete with the likes of OpenAI and Ramp for talent? At $1.15B startup @trybasis, CEO Matt Harpe says he first sells people on the category: "Accounting is extremely important, it's under-appreciated." Then, there's the tech: finding ways to leverage AI models and advances for an untapped market of 3 million knowledge workers in the field. "We really want to be the home for applied AI talent in New York," he says. "And I think there are a number of properties of accounting as a discipline that have forced us to be on the frontier of what's possible in terms of leveraging the abilities of these models to build very capable systems." Catch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling 🫡

Nobody wants to be an accountant anymore. Basis CEO Matt Harpe thinks he can help. Founded in 2023 by Harpe and @mitch_troy, Basis builds AI agents for accounting firms, automating hours of number crunching and copy-paste into a review process that takes minutes. @trybasis already works with 25% of the top 150 firms in the U.S. and reached a valuation of $1.15B in February. And far from eliminating jobs, Harpe believes his startup will help human accountants get paid. "It will increase how valuable accountants are, because they will be able to accomplish so much more," he says. On The Upstarts Podcast, Harpe shares: ▪️how Basis can stay ahead of the big labs like Anthropic and OpenAI in its vertical ▪️why outcome-based pricing is nice work, if you can get it ▪️how he pitches top AI talent in New York on building accounting tools, of all things. Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: resisting calls to chase short-term revenue until his product felt ready for primetime. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Introduction 01:47 The basis for Basis 07:25 Why no one wants to be an accountant any more 14:37 CEO Matt Harpe's founder journey 19:46 "The home for applied AI talent in New York" 22:58 Winning over skeptical accountants as customers 28:41 A big bet on agents from the start 31:31 Outcome-based pricing and its challenges 35:52 Competing with the big AI labs like OpenAI 41:11 Making human accountants more valuable A big thanks to our season sponsor, @Rippling, for supporting founder stories like this 🫡 Enjoy!

"As these companies like OpenAI and Anthropic go public, what's going to happen on the token side, on the cost side? Are companies going to be able to afford them?" At health AI unicorn @AbridgeHQ, 40% to 60% of weekly model outputs are via in-house work, says CEO Shiv Rao (@ShivdevRao). "We still use the frontier models, but we try to be very careful about which problems deserve those frontier models," he says. Abridge recently partnered with @nvidia to train a custom model for its healthcare agents. "The companies that can reach down lower into the stack, the ones that can really own and control their destiny, are going to be able to separate." Still, Abridge's plan is to ride along with advances from the labs, Rao says. "It's that sort of orchestration, or portfolio, approach to models that's going to win the day." Watch the full episode on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling 🫡

EXCLUSIVE: Henry AI has raised a $16.5M Series A led by FirstMark. Used by 150 commercial real estate brokerages to generate decks, the NYC startup is launching a new product, Henry Deal, to automate underwriting. "We're at the forefront of what I call the hard part of AI."

"The first big boss we had to go after, and compete against, was Microsoft." - @AbridgeHQ CEO Shiv Rao (@ShivdevRao) In healthcare, nobody's ever been fired for buying Microsoft. And VCs usually tell startups to prove themselves with small customers first. Not Abridge. 75% of doctors in the U.S. practice in big health systems. "To build a big, impactful, legacy-leaving, generational company, you need to get there as fast as you can," Rao says. So Abridge made the "YOLO move" as a 50-person startup to go after Microsoft head-to-head. "If it didn't work out for us with these first couple systems, we would've been dead." Watch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling.