Cosmin Nicolaescu

Ever since I met @sidd in our early days at Stripe, I hoped we’d one day find an idea big enough to start a company together. That day is finally here. After building quietly for the past year, I’m excited to officially launch @AccrualHQ, a new foundation for professional accounting 👇

Working at the edge of AI-native means we're not just building AI for our clients. We're building it for our team. Meet Arc: the Accrual Remote Coder. An agent platform we built ourselves, for ourselves. CPAs propose changes to the tax logic they review. Account managers show up to calls already briefed. Support ships its own fixes. Titles stop mattering when the tooling removes the boundary between them. Our teammate Jarrod wrote about what that looks like from the inside - this is the first of two posts on Arc. Read more: accrual.com/insights/arc-h…

Accrual has converted 100% of our pilots to production with the biggest accounting firms in the country. @getCos chatted with @pablosrugo on the latest episode of The Product Market Fit Show to share more about Accrual's growth. From Cos: "Most AI tools in accounting quietly patch over failures. Humans fixing what the model got wrong before you see it. Running the same return multiple times and handing you the best version. We don't do that. We show firms exactly what the AI produces, return by return, side by side with what they finalized. Where we're wrong, we say why." Listen here: pmf.show/episodes/ep-43…

"Writing code is one of the most satisfactory things in my life. Almost every day, if I had a choice, I would end up writing code," - @getCos, Co-Founder and CEO of Accrual. Our team isn't all engineers, but we're bringing an engineering mindset to everything we do at Accrual: never stop building, improving, and delivering. Many thanks to @_uncoveredmedia for capturing what we're all about. founderuncovered.com/p/cosmin-nicol…

@jgreze @TownAI @arampell @a16z @kirstengreen @ForerunnerVC @firstround @altcap @conviction Kudos on the launch, ballsy to open up with bloopers :)

Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you. We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction. Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents. We think that’s backwards. The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you. Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so. All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time. Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.

@steijnpelle Congrats on the launch, and more importantly, the incredible journey here. You guys rock!

Today, we're introducing Lassie and $47M in funding led by a16z. We're building AI that runs small businesses, starting with doctors' offices. Lassie is already trusted by 700+ practices across the country, working autonomously to provide them with 30 hours of labor per month. To get here, we first had to leave Robinhood and Superhuman to work in offices ourselves. Here's how that went.

Demos are easy. Production is hard. This season Accrual helped CPAs prepare nearly 20,000 complex tax returns. You don't get there with a wrapper. Sat down with @marcbhargava from @generalcatalyst on what AI-native actually means for accounting.

Firm Growth Forum with @AccountingToday is a wrap! It was great to see so many clients, advisors, and industry leaders all in one place this week in sunny San Diego. Very proud of the way Accrual showed up - from panel discussions, to onstage case studies with @Armanino_HQ, to dinners and nonstop conversations. The through line was clear: firms are moving past the question of whether AI will matter in accounting. They are focused on how to pilot it, evaluate quality, build trust with reviewers, and move from a controlled test to a firm-wide rollout.

First tax season at scale == tons of learnings 🤓

@AccrualHQ @Armanino_HQ The most ambitious firms aren't buying point solutions. They're rebuilding how the work gets done. 82% of Armanino users plan to expand next season. Grateful to Cody, Tim Webb, Chris Carlberg, and the entire Armanino team. Full case study and video: accrual.com/insights/arman…

What that looked like in practice: • 15 min median time to draft a return • 3 existing tools replaced with Accrual • 74% client portal acceptance (industry: 10 to 40%) • Up to 60% fewer prep hours on complex returns • Reviewers shifted from field-by-field verification to judgment and client work

🧵@AccrualHQ is building the platform accounting firms can run their AI transformation on. That's why @Armanino_HQ has been such a strong partner. As part of their Vision 2030, they set out to rethink how tax work gets done, and brought AI into production this season across six offices.

A new genre of AI benchmark keeps reaching the same verdict: "AI can't do accounting." We've read them. The problem isn't the execution. It's that they evaluate an agent in isolation, asked to produce a Form 1040 in one shot, with no review, no iteration. No preparer would work that way either. Production systems are built differently. They pair the agent with a deterministic tax engine. They give it the same context a preparer has: emails, prior-year work papers, client notes. They flag uncertainty instead of guessing. They iterate, with secondary agent reviews catching inconsistencies before a human ever opens the draft. The right question for firm leaders isn't "what does this AI score?" It's "is this designed to work the way tax preparation actually works?" Read more in our latest article in @AccountingToday accountingtoday.com/opinion/ai-can…

AI isn't a question of strategy for accounting firms anymore. It's one of execution. Great conversation @houlihanlokey 's ONE Global Conference this week about the billable hour, deployment strategy, and AI’s role in growth and service line expansion. A few things that stood out - @getCos : ➡️ AI is now a board-level execution mandate. The days of "wait and see" are gone. ➡️ Compliance is the engine. Automating compliance workflows generates the leverage. ➡️ The innovation of today is the commodity of tomorrow. Models are evolving at an incredible rate, and accounting has been historically neglected, which means abundant low-hanging fruit. Expect the floor to rise every tax season.

@samdblond Kudos to you and the team for crushing it right off the bat!

We're announcing our $50M Series B led by Benchmark. Founders Fund and Human Capital are tripling down in the round. We gave Benchmark a sneak preview of our upcoming GA release. They saw the future of sales. We had a term sheet 2 hours later. The future of sales is Monaco.

Our team is back from @BDOAlliance EVOLVE! A year ago, the question was "will AI matter for tax?" This year, nobody asked that. The questions were sharper: where does Accrual actually work, and how do we put it into a firm without breaking the things that already work? Most of our "just taking a look" conversations turned into workflow conversations within ten minutes. That tracks with where the market is. A few takeaways: ➡️ Firms aren't shopping for tools anymore. They're rethinking the whole arc, intake, prep, validation, review, as one system. Point solutions are starting to feel like the problem, not the answer. ➡️Trust is the constraint. Not speed, not UX. Accountants want traceable data, continuous validation, outputs that a preparer can sign their name to. Without that, faster is worse. ➡️Buying still happens in rooms like BDO Evolve, not on websites, not from a demo link. Every vendor is claiming AI right now, and firm leaders are sorting real from noise. The bar to earn trust is a real conversation. Usually over dinner. Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth and joined one of our events!

Met with @FirasSozan on what you actually give up to be a founder: 🔒 Employees can leave when a company stops being right for them. Founders can't. If it's working, no one wants you to go. If it's not, no one wants to take it on. 📈 Every hire adds a notch of stress. Each person is betting their career on you, and you carry that. 🎯 Most decisions don't matter. A handful do. The job is figuring out which is which. Full episode: m.youtube.com/watch?v=9XxE7q…

Tax engines. Portals. CRM. Workflow. Billing. Time tracking. Plus the email and shared drives holding it all together. Accrual plugs into the stack you already have. Here’s how we think about integration: accrual.com/insights/how-a…

A successful AI pilot does not always translate into deployment. The gap between "this worked for the pilot group" and "this is now how thousands of people across nationwide offices prepare taxes" is where most enterprise AI initiatives stall... That's not because the technology failed, but because rolling out AI tools is genuinely novel work that demands more hands-on training, change management, and workflow redesign than most firms anticipate. We've published a step-by-step guide, which draws from practical experience successfully implementing AI tax prep across firms during the TS26 season. We're out here demystifying AI integration. Learn more at: lnkd.in/eHTCmwbe