At a Glance

  • Maxima, headquartered in San Mateo, California, announced in a press release on Wednesday the launch of a new feature in its accounting platform called "Max," anAI agentthat works alongside a company's existing enterprise systems.
  • According to the company, the AI accounting agent can handle repetitive tasks typically done by humans, including payroll entries, balance sheet reconciliations, and variance explanations. The results are returned to accountants for approval before being posted to the general ledger.
  • The new product consolidates three capabilities previously handled by separate agents—transaction accounting, month-end workflows and close processing, and accounting intelligence—into a single agent. Maxima co-founder and CEO, CFO Yogi Goel said, "Accountants can now delegate preparation work for multiple use cases directly to Max, just like collaborating with a teammate, without needing to interact with individual agents or modules," Goel said in an email response.

Deep Dive

Maxima's platform update comes as CFOs and accounting teams navigate AI and other technological changes that are reshaping how companies handle foundational accounting and finance tasks. As previously reported by CFO Dive, AI-driven accounting is expected toreduce accounting costs and staffing needswhile also requiring a new generation of accountants to make professional judgments on processes without prior hands-on experience.

Maxima, founded in 2024, is a private company. According to the press release, its investors include venture capital firms Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Audacious Ventures. The company describes itself as an "agentic accounting work system" layered on top of existing enterprise resource planning systems.

Goel said that before the Max update, accountants "still had to drive the process themselves," such as gathering data, preparing schedules, and drafting journal entries. With Max, the company says early users save up to 60 hours of labor per employee per month. Goel noted that Max differs from AI chatbots because it can "orchestrate multi-step workflows."

"Unlike general-purpose AI systems like Claude or ChatGPT, Max is not a standalone agent layered on top of the general ledger," Goel said. "It is purpose-built for accounting, with audit trails, role-based permissions, segregation of duties, validation checks, deterministic execution, human review and approval, and domain-specific accounting tools."

Josh Waldron, CAO and interim CFO at Scale AI in San Francisco, which provides data infrastructure support for large language model labs, said his company began using Maxima at the end of 2024 to reconcile outgoing payments, a process that is now completed instantly. Previously, the process could take up to two weeks because the company had to manually consolidate data from numerous cash accounts worldwide and assess variables such as exchange rate fluctuations.

Waldron said his company benefits from Maxima's ability to connect multiple systems, extract data, and automatically upload it into Scale AI's Netsuite ERP system. In contrast, Waldron said some tools require companies to download bank statements and then manually enter them into the system, a cumbersome process. Since adopting the change, Waldron has built confidence in the system and continued to optimize other parts of the company's close process.

"In the past, it sometimes took us a full month to close the books, and last month we completed the close within the first two weeks of the month, which set a record for us," Waldron said.

To date, Maxima has raised $41 million in funding and has processed over $400 billion in total transaction volume.