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.

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."

"All companies need to have one strong idea that they hold tightly to and that's the North Star." says @AbridgeHQ CEO @ShivdevRao. "Otherwise, you get blown in so many different directions." His North Star? Trust. This season is presented by @Rippling.

A self-driving system for invention, built by materials scientists. We know the ground truth for material science is not on a computer. It is in the lab. @josephfkrause @alexrkonrad

"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.

Interesting to see OpenAI leadership talking more about their ambitions in voice after the GPT-Live launch. Last week, @gdb told reporters that "clicking things, and typing things" is on its way out. Now @sama below saying it makes him want "a new kind of computer" 👀

EXCLUSIVE: Voice startup Wispr has launched an AI lab to bring 'Jarvis' to life. The maker of popular dictation tool Wispr Flow plans to hire up to 50 researchers, at a commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars, CEO Tanay Kothari (@tankots) tells Upstarts. Our story 👇

"All companies need to have one strong idea that they hold tightly to and that's the North Star." says @AbridgeHQ CEO @ShivdevRao. "Otherwise, you get blown in so many different directions." His North Star? Trust. This season is presented by @Rippling.

"Survive. Don't sell. Don't quit." Powerful advice from @Get_Writer CEO @may_habib. For her, the most important decision for a startup is choosing to stay in the game. Catch the full story on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling