By Aditya Soni (Reuters) -Artificial intelligence startup Maxima has raised about $41 million from investors including Redpoint Ventures and Kleiner Perkins as it looks to automate accounting for businesses, the company said on Tuesday. The $143 million valuation after Seed and Series A funding for the one-year-old San Mateo, California-based startup shows strong investor demand for firms building AI-driven enterprise software. The fundraise was joined by Audacious Ventures and Joe Montana, NFL Super Bowl Champion and Liquid 2 Managing Partner, among others. Maxima argues its AI platform can better automate tasks such as reconciliation and journal entry than dominant legacy providers such as SAP and Blackline, and thus save costs as well as time. "They (legacy providers) had the central assumption humans will do the work and they log the work for auditors to come check the work. We are completely starting this from scratch where we are saying agents will do the work and humans will review it," Maxima co-founder and CEO Yogi Goel told Reuters. There have been questions about the real-world usefulness of AI tools after an MIT study earlier this year found 95% of pilot projects never advance past initial testing, and about their reliability and accuracy. But Goel said the company has "processed millions of transactions for our customers and not a single error that has been made." Scale AI accounting head Joshua Waldron told Reuters that Maxima's platform has cut time taken to do tasks such as flux analysis to hours from days previously. Other Maxima customers include fintech firm SpotOn and HR software startup Rippling. Maxima plans to use the new funds to fuel development and expand its 31-strong team. Its other co-founders are former Twitter engineer Akshaya Srivatsa and ex-Netflix engineer Jack Liao. (Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
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