Cosmin Nicoleascu and Siddharth Chandrasekaran became best friends at Stripe, bonding over building financial infrastructure and finding beauty in the mechanics everyone else ignores: the flows of capital, the regulations governing it, and the frameworks businesses build to navigate both. Nearly a decade later, after Cos served as CTO of Brex and Sidd led financial infrastructure at Stripe, they reunited to build together. Among their first believers were the founders of Stripe and Brex.

They approached accounting with the same curiosity. Where everyone else saw an industry too complex, too regulated, and too resistant to change, they saw an opportunity to build a new operating system for CPAs. Their commitment became undeniable when they enrolled in community college courses to qualify for the CPA exam. Then they took our personal tax returns home as a test case and came back understanding our finances as well as any advisor. Today, they're launching Accrual.

We're proud to lead Accrual's first two funding rounds through our Creation strategy, which partners with founders from day zero to build companies that tackle the hardest, most consequential problems. In Cos and Sidd, we found creative, experienced operators with genuine care for the people their technology serves. They leave every conversation, client, and team better than they found it, and we couldn't be happier to be supporting them, alongside angels Will Gaybrick, Lachy Groom, and others.

Rebuilding Accounting Infrastructure

Accounting firms, the backbone of global commerce, still run on fragmented, static workflows. One leading firm told Cos and Sidd that it juggles six different systems to prepare a single tax return, with no way to connect them. Firms keep adding specialized software, but more tools mean more complexity. Meanwhile, as CPAs become increasingly scarce and policy complexity explodes, routine volume consumes the time that talented accountants need for strategic work. Cos and Sidd saw a fundamental breakdown in how expertise translates into value, and adopted a mission to enable firms to finally trade spreadsheets for strategy.

Accrual is a unified system built around how accounting work actually flows. The platform ingests client documents, extracts and structures financial data automatically, generates draft workpapers, and enables CPAs to review and refine everything in one place. 

Augmenting CPA Capacity

With Accrual, information becomes useful the moment it enters the system. AI does the tedious work of reading through statements, pulling data from forms, and identifying inconsistencies. This frees CPAs to focus on what requires genuine expertise: interpreting complex situations, advising clients on strategy, and building relationships. By handling the mechanical tasks, Accrual scales existing expertise to handle complexity that once required significant headcount expansion.

The firms that piloted Accrual last year saw dramatic improvements. Firms are saving six hours on simple returns and cutting preparation time by up to 85 percent on complex cases. Beyond speed, accuracy has improved across the board.

What Cos and Sidd are creating can change how millions of businesses work with their accountants. This is foundational work, and we're honored to be Accrual's partners in it.