Thomson Reuters Corporation, a global content and technology company, today announced it has acquired Materia, a US-based startup that specializes in the development of an agentic AI assistant for the tax, audit and accounting profession. This transaction, which is complementary to Thomson Reuters AI roadmap, accelerates Thomson Reuters vision for the provision of generative AI tools to the professions it serves.
Founded in 2022, Materia is purpose built for tax, audit and accounting use cases. Its agentic AI assistant automates and augments research and workflows helping accountants to improve efficiency, effectiveness and the value they add to their clients.
“Our vision is to provide each professional we serve with a Gen AI assistant. Materia will further accelerate this vision for our tax, audit and accounting customers,” said David Wong, Chief Product Officer, Thomson Reuters. “Once fully integrated, Materia will transform work and unify the entire customer experience with applications across our tax, audit, and accounting portfolio. We are excited by the potential of combining Materia with Thomson Reuters content, know-how, and solutions.”
“Materia is defining the future for how agentic AI can enhance the accounting profession. Our vision is to eliminate low-value, tedious tasks, and in doing so, both increase quality, and free up accounting teams to focus on higher value advisory work for their clients, said Kevin Merlini, CEO of Materia. “We are excited to join Thomson Reuters on this exciting journey toward our shared vision. By combining, we will be able to move more quickly toward this objective and will unlock new opportunities to deliver highly-requested solutions for our customers.“
Thomson Reuters Ventures, an early investor in Materia, led the effort to launch a proof-of-concept initiative that allowed select Checkpoint Edge users to engage with certain Checkpoint content through Materia’s AI assistant. The promising initial results from this work provides confidence that Thomson Reuters and Materia together can best leverage generative AI to deliver value for Thomson Reuters tax, audit and accounting customers.