Slava Orekoff spends much of his time in West Caldwell, Verona, and Montclair, N.J., talking to accountants who are ready to quit.

Most of them don’t want to stop seeing clients, he says. They just want to stop running a business.

“You have your server down, you have an escalation coming in, your bill didn’t go through with the vendor, you have all these problems with hiring,” Orekoff told Fortune. “Maybe they were excited when they started building their business 25 years ago or 35 years ago. After a while, the things did not excite you anymore.”

Orekoff is cofounder and CEO of Numica, a New York startup that buys small accounting practices from retiring owners, keeps their staff and clients, and moves the work onto its AI software. The company announced Thursday it raised $21 million in combined equity and debt from Roosh X, the investment arm of Ukrainian tech group Roosh, and London-based Flashpoint. Orekoff said most of the money will go toward buying more firms.

Numica launched in June 2025. As of Thursday, it had bought seven practices and serves about 6,000 clients in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, and California, including restaurants, trucking companies, real estate firms, and health care practices. Orekoff said Numica closed its latest deal Monday and expects to close another next week.

Roughly half of the country’s 87,000 small accounting firms are owned by baby boomer CPAs or enrolled agents who will retire within five to seven years, Orekoff said, and fewer people are coming up behind them. Meanwhile, U.S. schools awarded 55,152 bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting in the 2023–24 school year, down 6.6% from the year before, according to the American Institute of CPAs.

Even Orekoff has started seeing it personally: Numica’s new head of operations told him that a regional firm she worked for used to get about 150 accounting students a year from a partner state university into its internship program, but now, it gets fewer than 60.

That leaves clients with nowhere to go. “If your CPA is retiring, you are left,” Orekoff said. “What they are buying most of the time is peace of mind.”

How Numica works

From the first day, Numica takes over billing, hiring, and technical systems. The staff accountants that clients already deal with stay in place. Owners can stay on part-time to handle their longest-standing clients, under transition plans that can run up to four years, and Orekoff said most people do just that.

“We were thinking that there will be more stress when it comes to transition,” Orekoff said. “In fact, clients are more appreciative than anything else.” He said some clients have sent congratulations to the owners who sold.

Numica finds firms partly through its own AI tools, which watch broker listings and online marketplaces. Orekoff says the company learns of a new listing within five minutes. Referrals from accountants who have already sold are now its biggest source of deals.

Accounting, Orekoff says, is “about thousands of small things that need to be done,” and those tasks are well documented, which makes them a good fit for AI. Numica’s software codes each transaction, builds the profit-and-loss statement and balance sheet, and prepares state, federal, sales, and payroll tax filings. Orekoff says it covered about 75% of the firms’ workflows in its first year. Accountants check the output, handle unusual cases, and deal with clients. A CPA still reviews and signs the final work.

The company says margins at its first practice, in New York, rose from 37% to 52% within two months, and it projects they will reach 70%.

Clients are told when their firm is sold. Many states require client consent, and Orekoff said consent letters went out two hours after the most recent deal closed. But clients are generally not told AI is doing much of the work.

“Do you care if a calculator or Excel was used to make calculations?” Orekoff said. He allowed that some clients might leave over it: “People are always scared by some kind of new stuff which is unknown.”

Some clients are already using AI on their own. Orekoff says customers now come in after asking ChatGPT how to structure their taxes, and accountants have to explain why the advice doesn’t apply to them.

“A lot of AIs are now programmed in a way that they want to please you,” he said. “Because of that, it will not disagree with you.”

Orekoff started writing accounting software at 17 and worked on it for about seven years before joining SAP, whose systems he calls “glorified accounting” for large companies. He cofounded Numica with Victor Lysenko.

“I’ve never heard of someone dreaming to become a person moving numbers from one spreadsheet to another,” Orekoff said. “The future of the industry is to be more client facing, spend more time with the client.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com