Maxima raises $41M Series A to automate the month-end close with AI agents across ERPs

experts. We're going to our lightning round. We got Yogi Goell from Maxima announcing a massive round. Let's bring him in to the TBP and Ultra Dome. Welcome the show. Uh, what is your t-shirt? Introduce yourself. What do you do? give us the news. What's the latest?

Absolutely. So nice to meet you both, Jordi and John.

Great to meet you.

Uh Yogi here uh from Maxima. We are an enterprise accounting platform focusing on waging the war on the month and close process.

Let's go.

Uh we are uh in a short focus we are co- AI agents are co-writing

the u monthly financial package and preparing the data for the accounting team. Yeah,

we've been around for now five six quarters and helping incredible companies like scale AI rippling spoton uh press juice. So, a lot of companies in both uh tech and non- tech world to to make accounting sexy again.

Very very on brand to count uh your the the time you've been in business by quarters. [laughter]

Exactly.

And what's the news today? Break it down for us. Yeah. So, we uh just raised uh $41 million in C++ series A.

All right. There we go.

Congratulations.

Very exciting. Uh explain to me how this plugs in. Obviously, there's a lot of folks that have an accounting uh layer of record, a single PL pane of glass, an ERP, an accounting suite. Uh do you want to just plug into that? Do you want to rip and replace that? There's so many different folks uh eating around the edges, creating different solutions. I don't think anyone knows exactly how the market will play out, but what have you built?

Yep. So, we've built a system of action and system of intelligence which works with any system of record. So, when you go to an in uh uh enterprise company uh asking them to replace ERP is like asking them to do a brain surgery. I I was a nickn uh your system of record is where your data should eventually sit. We do the uh we help with automating the human work of grabbing the data uh from upstream systems doing the manual uh doing the uh our agents do the auto automated work and then uh eventually finding anomalies and errors. I don't know if you were following but last year was uh the maximum number of companies in the US which had uh material misstatements and like up to 40% stock drops stock price.

It was the most mistakes from accounting specifically last year. That's not good. Uh hopefully we can fix that. Uh I have one last question and then we will let you go. Um I want to know uh give me some examples of where uh the current crop of AI models really excels in finding these types of problems and then where do you want to still leave the human in the loop? Where do you want the human where what's the really intractable problem that maybe we'll solve in a few years with AI, but for now you'd leave it with the human.

Yeah. So, um, the

you got to have somebody to fire. [laughter]

Who's the last guy in the accounting office, I guess, is the question. But, you know, I I'd love some examples of of of problems that really excel for AI and and problems that are maybe more intractable.

Yeah. Look, I I'll just start with saying u our problem we are not going after the human uh labor salary. We are going after errors, inefficiency and pain that I personally face both as an auditor and and and as an accountant for 20 years. Uh there are not enough accountants in the world that you can truly hire uh for the amount of work that's there. So uh in terms of where uh AIS are very good at today, they are very good at taking uh a defined set of uh instructions and following things over and over again for variety of transactions provided you give them uh deterministic operators which we have built that they will only use those tools and and then come up with the right answer. So we are using this hybrid approach where agents follow Maxima tools to come up with the exact same answer. And so when deoid and ey comes knocking looking at the uh work that maxima produced they will they will do 2 plus 5 and the answer will always be seven it will not just be 15. Uh so that's one thing we determined really well. Second is it's uh really good at finding anomalous behaviors and errors uh that might happen because it is u uh it looking at millions of transactions over time within the company. can just see that, hey, this your legal bill used to be $50,000. Suddenly, it's $500,000. Turns out uh Jim Jim had a late night and he had one extra zero and that's why it went up.

Yeah. And and I mean artificial intelligence has been used in like fraud detection for years and years and years and so applying that sort of heruristic based stochcastic based more less less uh deterministic uh computing, more probabilistic computing makes a ton of sense there.

I I love I love the positioning around pain and errors. You got to talk to the venture capitalists who are yelling loudly to anyone that will hear, "We're going to replace all labor. Give me more money to replace labor." It's like, "No, you can just you can you can show the the sort of optimistic uh like positive, you know."

Well, well, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations on the massive round. We will talk.

Yeah. Great to meet you. I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

And have a great rest of your day.

Great shirt, too.

Appreciate it.

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