Clark Raised $11 Million to Put AI 'Clerks' on Audits. What It Means for New York CPA Firms and the Companies They Audit

NEW YORK — Ask any founder who has been through a first financial-statement audit what took the longest, and the answer is rarely the analysis. It’s the back-and-forth: the auditor asks for a document, someone on the finance team finds it days later, and the cycle repeats. A New York startup just raised money on the bet that software can run most of that loop on its own.

Clark, which builds AI for audit and assurance work, announced an $11 million seed round on Nov. 2, led by Touring Capital, with returning investors Marathon Management Partners, Rerail and Sofeon Ventures participating. Combined with a $5 million round Marathon led in September 2025, the company says it has now raised $16 million. AlleyWatch reports Clark was founded in 2025 by Enes Witwit, its CEO. The company was previously known as uiAgent.

What Clark Built

Alongside the funding, Clark launched what it calls Clerks, which it describes as “autonomous AI employees that perform audit work for CPA firms.” According to the company’s announcement, each Clerk is assigned to an engagement the way a staff auditor would be. It reviews documents, performs tests and prepares workpapers. When something is missing, it requests it from the client, tracks the response and resumes the work once the information arrives, without someone prompting it again.

Clerks run on what Clark calls Material Intelligence, an internal system that combines an agent framework, document processing and a layered memory meant to carry context forward through an engagement. The company is clear on one point that matters a great deal in a regulated profession: licensed CPAs still make the professional judgments, review the work and sign the opinion.

Clark says more than 35 CPA firms already use it, naming CliftonLarsonAllen, Aprio, Kreischer Miller and Sensiba. It also offers firms what it calls a 100% accuracy guarantee and a peer review guarantee. “A promise of accuracy only means something when it has money behind it,” Witwit said in the release. The company did not publish the terms of those guarantees, so firms should read the contract language closely before relying on them.

Where the Money Goes

Clark says it will use the funding to expand its senior team across product, engineering and sales, bring Clerks to more firms and more kinds of engagements, help CPA firms extend audit services into government work and build toward “fully autonomous audit employees.” It is also working on continuous monitoring, meaning findings that stay current between annual audits, each stating what it covers and when it was last checked.

“Assurance is fundamentally a trust business, and AI creates an opportunity to dramatically expand what CPA firms can accomplish without compromising that trust,” said Priya Saiprasad, co-founder and general partner at Touring Capital.

A Crowded Corner of Fintech

Clark isn’t alone. The Next Web, which covered the round, notes that Andera raised $37 million in June to automate internal audits and that Benford is building an audit firm around its own software. The publication points out that audit is a market Big Four firms charge for by the hour, which makes it a natural target for software that compresses hours of repetitive fieldwork.

What It Means for New York Founders and Firms

If you run or work at a CPA firm. The pitch is capacity: more engagements without proportionally more junior hires. The questions to ask any vendor are practical. How is AI-prepared work documented so it survives peer review and regulatory inspection? What exactly does the accuracy guarantee cover, and what’s excluded? Who owns client data, and where is it stored? Run a pilot on a lower-risk engagement before rolling anything out firm-wide.

If your company is about to be audited. Expect the requests to look different. An AI agent that follows up automatically can move faster than a busy staff auditor, which is good news if your books are organized and uncomfortable if they aren’t. The best preparation hasn’t changed: a clean close process, reconciled accounts and supporting documents filed where you can find them. Ask your audit firm up front whether AI tools will be used on your engagement and how your data will be handled.

If you’re building in fintech or professional services. Clark’s model, AI that does the work while a licensed human keeps the liability, is a template that’s spreading across tax, legal and compliance. The differentiator isn’t just the model; it’s the willingness to stand behind outputs, and the trust that follows from that. A guarantee with money behind it is a sales argument as much as a product feature.

What to Watch

The near-term signals are whether more large firms adopt Clerks, how peer reviewers and regulators treat AI-prepared workpapers in practice and whether continuous monitoring catches on with clients who are used to a once-a-year opinion. For now, the takeaway for New York’s finance community is simple: the most tedious parts of the audit are quickly becoming software.