The month-end close is one of those rituals that everyone agrees is important and no one enjoys. Somebody has to take the cash that moved through the bank, the invoices that went out through the billing system, the payroll that ran, the leases that amortized, the commissions that accrued, and turn all of it into a set of journal entries that tie out to the penny. If they don't tie, someone stays late. If they do tie, someone still stays late, just to be sure. The reward for doing this perfectly is that you get to do it again next month.
Maxima, founded in 2024 and based in San Mateo, California, looked at this and asked a question that sounds obvious but turns out to be hard: what if the accountant's login screen showed work that was already finished? Not a checklist of tasks to do. Not a dashboard telling you who is behind. The actual entries, prepared and validated, waiting for a human to review and approve. The company's tagline is "agentic accounting automation, from record to report," which is a mouthful, but the idea underneath it is clean.
The distinction Maxima keeps drawing is between tracking the work and doing the work. There is an entire category of software - BlackLine, FloQast, Workiva - that helps finance teams manage the close. It routes approvals, logs who did what, tracks tasks against a calendar. This is useful, and also it is a to-do list. The actual accounting still happens in spreadsheets, at night, by a person. Maxima's pitch is that the person's most tedious hours are automatable, and that the right unit of automation is not a task tracker but an agent that prepares journal entries, reconciliations, and flux analysis on its own.
The product is called Max, and Maxima describes it as a 24/7 accounting agent. It connects to more than 100 financial systems - banks, billing platforms, payroll tools, data warehouses - pulls the data, applies the company's own accounting policies, and prepares the outputs. Cash coding, balance sheet reconciliations, prepaids and amortization, lease entries, commission accruals, equity journals, fixed-asset depreciation, allocations: the unglamorous machinery of a corporate ledger. When the accountants arrive, the core work is prepared and, in Maxima's phrasing, "accurate by default, compliant by design."
"We're closing two to three days faster with over 98% automation. It's the closest thing to an 'easy button' I've ever seen in accounting."Josh Waldron · Chief Accounting Officer, Scale AI
The crucial design decision - and the one that makes the whole thing sellable to a CFO - is that Maxima does not replace your ERP. It sits on top of it. If you run NetSuite, you keep running NetSuite. Maxima reads from your systems, prepares the work, and pushes audit-ready outputs back into the ERP once a human has reviewed and approved them. This is the quiet genius of the go-to-market: enterprise finance teams will change almost anything before they will rip out their system of record, so Maxima simply became the layer that makes the system of record less painful.
Then there is the part that actually matters when you are automating the general ledger, which is that the general ledger is the one place in a company where you genuinely cannot afford a machine to make something up. An AI that hallucinates a plausible-sounding paragraph is a nuisance. An AI that hallucinates a plausible-sounding journal entry is a restatement. So Maxima built for auditors first: every agent-prepared output carries its lineage, its inputs, and its approvals, producing what the company calls a "re-performable audit trail." An auditor can trace any number back to where it came from and reproduce it. Trust, here, is not a feature bolted on at the end. It is the spec.
The traction numbers, which one should always read with a raised eyebrow because they come from the company, are nonetheless striking. Maxima says its agents have touched over $400 billion in transaction volume, with more than 90% of manual work automated, closes up to 80% faster, and full auditability. The customer list is the more persuasive evidence: Rippling, Scale AI, SpotOn, and Bilt Rewards - companies with real transaction complexity and real accounting teams who presumably would not keep using the thing if it invented numbers.
It helps that the market Maxima is walking into is enormous and structurally stuck. Every company of any size runs a close, most of them monthly, many of them still stitched together across spreadsheets and email. The incumbents digitized the coordination of that work years ago and then, more or less, stopped - because coordinating a task and performing it are genuinely different engineering problems, and the second one had to wait for AI agents that could be trusted with numbers. Maxima's timing argument is that the second one is now possible, and that whoever automates the work itself, rather than the tracking of it, gets to redraw the category.
The founders are an odd and interesting trio to be building accounting software. Yogi Goel, the CEO, spent two decades in finance and accounting roles at EY, Citigroup, Barclays, and Rubrik - the person who actually knows the pain. Akshaya Srivatsa, the chief product officer, came from Twitter, Bolt, and Meta. Jack Liao, the CTO, came from Netflix, Bolt, and Airbnb. Between them is roughly 25 years of combined experience across audit, investment banking, and some of the most demanding consumer-scale engineering in the industry. It is a team you would assemble to build a viral app; they chose to build the thing that makes the fifth business day less miserable.
In November 2025 the company announced $41 million in combined Seed and Series A funding, led by Redpoint Ventures and Kleiner Perkins with Audacious Ventures, at a valuation of roughly $143 million - about a year after founding. The cap table reads like a finance-industry endorsement letter: former BlackLine executives Andres Botero and Eric Borrmann, Rubrik CFO Kiran Choudary, Vanta CFO David Eckstein, and, because venture capital contains multitudes, NFL Hall of Famer Joe Montana through Liquid 2 Ventures. When the people who built and ran the incumbent close-management category write checks into the company trying to replace it, that is a signal worth noticing.
What Maxima is really selling is time - specifically, the return of the accountant's judgment. The premise is that the close was never a people problem. It was a tooling problem that happened to fall on people. Move the preparation to agents, keep the review and the judgment with humans, and the finance team's worst week becomes a review instead of a fire drill. Whether Maxima proves that at scale is the open question. That the question is finally being asked in production, on real ledgers, at companies you have heard of, is the news.