Clark launches Clerks, autonomous AI employees for CPA audit teams, with an $11M seed round

Clark, a New York company that builds AI for professional services firms, today launched Clerks, autonomous AI employees that perform audit work for CPA firms. The company also announced an $11 million seed round led by Touring Capital, with participation from returning investors Marathon Management Partners, Rerail and Sofeon Ventures. Together with a $5 million round Marathon led in September 2025, the financing brings Clark’s total funding to $16 million. Clark was formerly known as uiAgent.

The pitch is blunt: audits still arrive as a snapshot of a year that has already ended, while the records behind them have become cheaper to fake. Clark’s answer is not a chatbot that answers questions about an audit, but a worker assigned to one — an AI employee that stays on the engagement and keeps the work moving when nobody is watching.

Assigned like a staff auditor, working between check-ins#

Each Clerk is assigned to an engagement the way a staff auditor would be, and works through audit areas from start to finish: reviewing documents, performing tests and preparing workpapers. When something is missing, the Clerk requests it from the client, tracks the response, and picks the work back up the moment the information arrives, without anyone prompting it again. “Our Clerks don’t sleep,” founder and chief executive Enes Witwit said in the announcement. “They stay on the engagement, chase what’s missing and keep the work moving between the moments an auditor looks at it.”

Clark told Accounting Today that the software keeps a live model of each engagement: the status of every request for documents, every workpaper and every procedure in the audit programme, and every document, client email and change in the client’s accounting data. If a client uploads a document at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, Clark sees it then, checks it, and starts any procedure that was waiting on it. Routine updates are handled quietly; what deserves an auditor’s attention is escalated with the evidence attached.

Material Intelligence, the Clerk’s brain#

Clerks run on Material Intelligence, the AI operating system Clark built to serve as their brain. It combines an agent harness, document processing and a multi-layered memory system modelled on human memory, so a Clerk carries context forward the way an experienced auditor does — remembering materiality, prior-year issues, how a client organises its records and who to contact for what, instead of starting each returning engagement from scratch.

The guardrails matter as much as the autonomy. Clark told Accounting Today that a Clerk acts only through a fixed set of predefined actions, each with a permission level set by the firm, and works from the firm’s own audit programme, checklists and workpaper templates rather than a generic methodology. Calculations, sampling and statistics run as actual code, not as arithmetic inside the language model, and every result is tied back to its source document. The system also spends tokens only when something changes: a small, fast model screens out changes that clearly do not matter, and a larger reasoning model runs only for changes that might.

The guarantee — and who still signs#

Clark stands behind the work its AI performs. The company offers CPA firms a 100% accuracy guarantee and a peer review guarantee. “A promise of accuracy only means something when it has money behind it,” Witwit said. “If AI is going to do the work, the company that built it should answer for it.” The announcement does not publish the terms of either guarantee.

What does not change is who is accountable. Licensed CPAs make the professional judgments, review the work and sign the opinion, according to the announcement. Clerks today work alongside auditors; fully autonomous audit employees are the direction Clark says it is building toward, not what it claims to have shipped. More than 35 CPA firms, including CliftonLarsonAllen, Aprio and Sensiba, already use Clark on their audits, the company said.

What the $11 million is for#

Clark will use the funding to expand its senior team across product, engineering and sales, bring Clerks to more firms and more types of engagements, help CPA firms extend their audit services into government, and build toward fully autonomous audit employees. It is also working toward continuous monitoring that keeps findings current between audits, with each finding stating what it covers and when it was last checked — so a firm can say what is true now, not only what was true at year-end.

The release frames the opportunity with a U.S. Government Accountability Office estimate, cited by Clark, that the federal government loses $233 billion to $521 billion a year to fraud, with most audits of public money arriving after it has been spent. Clark’s argument is that continuous, affordable verification lets firms catch fraud and waste while a payment can still be stopped or recovered. That is the company’s case for the product, not a measured result: the announcement publishes no pricing, no rollout timetable and no independent evidence of accuracy, and the guarantees’ terms are undisclosed. The news today is narrower — a funded launch, with humans still signing.