Accord Partners · Founder Spotlight · Jun 22, 2026 · Cairo
Each block: the question, then a memorable declare (say it out loud), then 1–2 plain lines of proof. Answer, prove, stop.
They build for the CFO, not the auditor.
The law says you can't audit a company and sell it software at the same time. So their AI helps the finance team do its work — it can never sign the audit. We sign the audit. The more AI a company uses, the more they need someone independent to check it. That's us.
We don't compete on the AI. We own the firm.
Everyone gets the same AI models — they're cheap and shared. Their AI makes their own staff faster. Ours rebuilds a firm we own from the ground up — half the cost to run, and we keep every dollar of that. Different game: they rent the tool, we own the business AI transforms.
Our lead is real but won't last forever.
True — they'll catch up in a year or two. That's exactly why we move now. We buy and automate Saudi firms today, so by the time they catch up we're already the established player with the data and the relationships. You build that head start; you can't buy it.
Their tools are copyable. Buying the firm isn't.
Those are US and UK products — no Arabic, no Saudi tax rules, no local audit forms. And they just sell software to firms. We buy the firm, run our system inside it, and keep the profit. A software vendor only ever gets a subscription fee.
All that money is chasing America, not Saudi.
None of them has a Saudi license, our ownership structure, or a single relationship here. The Saudi market is huge, fragmented, and nobody has consolidated it. Their money proves the idea works — we just own the ground they can't reach.
Three engines no one else has together: AI, trust, and the license.
AI that cuts the cost of the work, local trust that wins the firms, and the license that lets us sign. No competitor has all three. The labs have AI but no license; the Big 4 have the license but won't buy small firms; nobody else has the local trust. We have the full stack.
Not the AI labs — a funded buyer copying us in the Gulf.
The real risk isn't OpenAI. It's a US-style roll-up bringing big money here once we've proven it works. But the things that matter — regulator trust, local relationships, an Egypt team — take a newcomer two to three years to build. We have them now. And in Saudi, the first credible buyer becomes the one everyone calls.
Too small for them, too hard for a software company.
Big 4 grow by adding partners, not buying up small local shops. A firm doing under $3M isn't worth their time. That's the gap we live in — too small for the giants, too local for the software players.
$5M next year, $98M by year five, $833M by year ten.
It starts slow because year one is one firm and a 100-day playbook. Then it compounds: $5M, $37M, $66M, $98M, then $149M, $239M, $388M, $568M, $833M. The jump isn't magic — it's more firms per year, each bigger, each on the platform. The model is built deal by deal, not a hockey stick we drew.
One to start, then a widening cadence — roughly 80 firms over ten years.
Year one: one firm. Year two: four to six. It climbs to ten-plus a year by year seven, fifteen-plus by years nine and ten. The pool is real — SOCPA has issued ~1,600 licenses, we've shortlisted ~455 firms, and six small-to-mid firms with regional offices are our first hit list.
$22M equity, $48M debt — $70M to deploy $552M of acquisitions.
Equity is front-loaded: $4M, $13M, $5M across the first three years, then we stop diluting. Debt ramps as the cash flows prove out — $5M to $18M a year, $48M total. That $70M buys $552M of firms because acquired EBITDA finances the later deals. The flywheel does the heavy lifting after year three.
Because by then the firms pay for the next firms.
The first three years are the proof phase — equity gets us the first handful of firms and the platform. Once those are on Accord OS at 40%+ margins, their cash funds new deals and we switch to debt. Founders and early investors stop getting diluted exactly when the model starts self-financing.
Buy at 3x and 20% margin, run at 40%-plus.
We buy profitable firms at about 3x earnings with 20% EBITDA margins. AI cuts the cost of the work and the Egypt team does the heavy lifting at ~10% of Saudi expat cost — that lifts margins past 40%. Same revenue, double the profit. That spread is the entire thesis.
A $950B profession heading to $1.8T by 2035.
Audit, accounting and tax globally. Saudi is the fast-forward beachhead — SMEs up 23% to 1.6M-plus, FDI up 24% to $30B-plus, and a wall of new regulation: transfer pricing now hits every zakat payer, local-content audits, off-plan escrow audits, ZATCA and VAT. The Expo and World Cup stack a once-in-a-generation compliance supercycle on top through 2034.
The early years are conservative; the upside is the cadence.
Year one is a single deal — we're not pretending otherwise. The big numbers come from acquisition pace and margin lift, both of which we model explicitly, not assume. If the cadence slips, the curve stretches — it doesn't break. We'd rather underwrite the 30% we control than the 75% we're still proving.
Buy. Automate. Grow. Reinvest.
We buy control of a good Saudi audit firm. We use AI to cut the cost of doing the work, which lifts margins. We bring it bigger clients it couldn't reach alone. Each firm we buy makes the next one easier and cheaper.
Audit is the power platform — it sees the truth first.
Audited numbers give us the earliest verified view of a company's health, before any bank or fintech. Audit sits us across the table from the principal, not junior staff. And it already touches the deepest, most fragmented mid-market at zero acquisition cost. Everything else — lending, tax, advisory — stacks on top of that access.
In the data from every firm we own.
Each firm we buy teaches our system how real audits work here — what clients send, where work gets stuck, what mistakes recur. No software company gets that data; it only comes from owning the firms. And it grows with every deal.
The AI is the input. The audit know-how is the product.
Anyone can plug into an AI model. Almost nobody has taught it how Saudi audits actually run — the trial-balance classifier, the contracts agent, the IFRS- and Zakat-compliant workpapers — using real engagement data. That's the hard part, and that's what we built.
It's a PE playbook with a VC engine bolted on.
PE has put $30B-plus into 50-plus accounting deals since 2020 — a third of the top 30 firms are now PE-backed. VC is funding the tech layer — Thrive into Crete, General Catalyst into Accrual. We're the first to run both at once in this region: own the firm like PE, transform it like VC.
Three targets. One closing now.
GreenCPA is in final paperwork with our lawyers — SAR 3M at about 3x earnings. We have offices in Riyadh and Cairo, our system is running live, first recurring revenue is in from AlJeel, we're a SOCPA forum partner, and DPI is already on our cap table.
Build, engage, close — in three acts.
Months one to four: co-build with small and mid firms on real data and start outreach. Months five to seven: LOIs and trials, align on deal and integration terms. Months eight to twelve: close the first firm, run the 100-day onboarding playbook, line up the next deals. One close in year one is the whole bar — and we're already in final paperwork.
30% gets us in today. 75% is upside, not a promise.
We can buy 30% right now under current rules — that part is certain. Going above that to 51% or 75% uses a structure we're still proving out in practice. So we plan the business on the 30% we know we have, and treat the rest as upside we're working toward.
Saudi partners sign everything. Egypt does the lifting underneath.
Costs run at about 10% of Saudi expat levels and it also closes the Saudization gap — from 42% to 80% in two years. But the discipline is the review: a SOCPA partner reviews and signs every file. Egypt does the heavy work; the judgment and the signature stay local.
Speed. Nothing else.
Our edge is time-limited and we need enough deals in the pipeline. The strategy is sound — the risk is just moving fast enough. Close firms and get the system running before the window closes.
An operator and a builder, at the right moment.
One of us built and sold Tribal Credit, backed by $180M from SoftBank and QED; the other was a CTO and computer-science professor who built the system. And this only works now — AI is what finally makes buying and running these firms profitable.
Two asks. Both simple.
Declare → Describe. Read the question, hit the headline, let the plain proof follow.