Dekel Yakobowich

🚨 BREAKING: Joshua Kushner's @ThriveCapital is putting $1 billion into buying local accounting firms and rebuilding them around AI. The acquisition arm is a company called Current. The pitch to a decades-old CPA firm: sell us a majority stake, keep a meaningful piece for yourselves, and we'll re-engineer the back office with AI. The ownership model is the part worth a look: → Traditional PE buys to sell inside a fixed window → Thrive plans to hold for the long run, the way Berkshire Hathaway does → Local partners keep real, meaningful stakes Patient capital, pointed at a fragmented, unglamorous industry. The proof point so far is Larson Gross – one accountant, one office in Bellingham, WA in 1949, grown into a regional firm with five offices and 200 employees. In 2025 its partners sold control to Current. @Forbes reports the in-house models are hitting up to 98% accuracy on data entry. Worth being precise, though – data entry is the high-volume floor of accounting, not the judgment work clients actually pay for. The skepticism is fair, too. AI roll-ups have been hyped for years and mostly underdelivered. The gap between the pitch and the operating reality is still wide. The bet underneath all of this: that permanent capital plus AI can run a professional-services firm better than the people who spent decades building it. If it works in accounting, the same template is waiting for law, insurance, and consulting. A billion-dollar wager on the back office of American business.