Portfolio News
Talk to any Partner at a mid-size CPA firm, and the frustration is the same: there are not enough CPAs to hire, and the ones they have are spending too much time on work that doesn’t require a CPA. Recent data in the March 2026 CPA Journal confirms this negative trend. Accounting grad enrollment is down 30% since 2016. The average CPA is over 50. There are no signs that firms will hire their way out of this.
What’s frustrating is that the hardest, most time-consuming part of tax prep has nothing to do with the actual judgment and expertise a CPA brings. It’s chasing down documents, opening PDFs, or typing K-1 values into a form. For complex clients with multiple partnerships, entity returns, or multi-state filings, the administrative time to prepare for taxes can go on for days before anyone applies accounting and tax expertise. Document portals and e-signatures have improved the outskirts of the workflow, but no one has solved the entire tax process, especially the mundane components.
That’s why we’re proud to announce Sorenson Capital’s investment in Byron!
What Byron Does
Byron plugs into the tech tax stack accounting firms already use and handles everything that happens before a CPA ever opens a tax return. Byron chases documents, reads through all of the details (including the messy, multi-page K-1 footnotes), and for business clients, connects directly to QuickBooks, NetSuite, or Xero to pull trial balance data and work through book-to-tax adjustments automatically. It flags what requires human decision, highlights what needs review, and pushes clean data straight into the tax engine.
CPAs get their time back for the work that truly requires their expertise, and the firm’s growth no longer hinges on hiring.
But in order to get to this point, an AI product requires absolute accuracy. An accountant needs to trust that the software will perform rigorous analysis and surface valid data. Byron runs multiple LLMs as part of a proprietary workflow, which – in Byron’s internal testing – is how they hit 97%+ accuracy on the hardest inputs. We spoke with several customers, and one put it very simply – they tried a competitor’s tool on the same documents, and Byron won out on every document.
Why Now – and Why This Team
People have been talking about automating tax prep for years. What’s different now is that LLMs can finally handle the worst inputs; the faxed, smudged, non-standard K-1 footnotes. Until recently, that was the hurdle. A tool that’s 90% accurate on tax documents isn’t useful; it just moves the work around. The multi-model architecture Byron uses, running several LLMs in parallel and verifying each other, is what makes the output trustworthy enough to act on.
Blaze O’Bryne, co-founder and CEO, spent time as a partner at Citi Ventures investing in AI and fintech before starting Byron. He knows this space from the inside, which means he also knew when the timing was finally right to build. He saw the opportunity to solve a deep problem with a clear wedge and assembled the right team to make it happen.
Co-founder and CTO, Wilm Kranz, led the autonomy initiative at Amazon and built its AGI multi-agent framework. He holds AI patents and came up through Boston Consulting Group before going deep on the engineering side. Wilm’s background shows up in just how thoughtfully Byron’s product is built.
The rest of the founding team is just as qualified. Matt Dunn is a working CPA who spent time at Deloitte and then automated tax workflows at Amazon – he brings deep insight into the nuance of what CPAs need. Jonathan Chiu led Amazon’s deployment of Anthropic to Alexa. Michael Snook built Amazon’s RLHF playbook. Ben Riseberg advised Fortune 500 companies on AI transformation at Bain.
In less than a year they have a working product, strong customers, and active partnerships with Truss and Canopy – incredible progress for an early-stage company in a market that is built on trust.
The Bigger Opportunity
Tax prep software is estimated to be a $2.5B+ category on top of a $14B services market, and the most valuable, most complex part of it – business tax – is where the existing tools are lagging the most. Currently, firms spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on tax software that doesn’t help them throughout the entire process. Byron is building to fill that gap.
Byron is compatible with the tax software firms already trust; there is no need to rip out existing systems or disrupt how anyone works. Firms don’t have to commit to a complete software overhaul; they will quickly see that Byron speeds up their existing workflow and improves accuracy. Byron meets their clients where they are already working.
At the individual level, the pitch is simple: the parts of the job that eat the most time and require the least expertise get handled. Accountants will have more bandwidth for the advisory work that requires their specialized training, and the type of work clients are increasingly willing to pay for. Byron isn’t trying to replace anyone; it gives the job meaning again.
We are proud to partner with Byron as Seed investors and support the team as they build the agentic platform that tax professionals have been waiting for.
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