If you own an accounting firm and you have been watching the private equity wave roll through the profession, you may have missed a quieter story that matters more. Over the past three years, a Tampa-based platform called Crete Professionals Alliance grew from a startup into one of the 30 largest accounting firms in the country, rebranded itself as Current, and ended up partially connected to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
This is not a software story. It is an ownership story. And if you are a firm owner thinking about your exit in the next five years, it changes the list of buyers you should understand.
Here is what happened, based on the public record, and what I think it means.
How Crete started
Crete Professionals Alliance was founded in 2023 by Jake Sloane and Frank Zhang, co-founders of the New York investment firm ZBS Partners. Both came out of large-cap private equity and M&A backgrounds, and ZBS had already built roll-ups in veterinary care, home services, and construction before turning to accounting. Their first partner firm, RRBB Accountants & Advisors in New Jersey, joined in August 2023.
The pitch was aimed squarely at succession-minded owners. In Crete's own words, the company was established "to create an alternative to the traditional exit options for accounting and professional services firm owners." Historically, independent firms faced two choices: stay independent with limited resources, or merge upstream and lose their identity. Crete offered a third structure. It invests in the non-attest side of a firm under an alternative practice structure, meaning audit and attest work stays in a separately owned CPA-licensed entity while tax, advisory, and back-office functions move under Crete's umbrella. Partner firms keep their brand, their leadership, and rollover equity.
The acquisition run
The model attracted capital quickly. In May 2024, Crete raised a strategic round co-led by Thrive Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners, with the stated purpose of adding more firms and scaling technology, including artificial intelligence.
By June 2025, Reuters reported that Crete planned to invest more than $500 million acquiring U.S. accounting firms over two years and equipping them with OpenAI-powered tools. At that point the platform had grown to more than $300 million in annual revenue, over 20 acquired businesses, roughly 900 employees across 17 offices, and an offshore delivery operation in India.
The partner list kept growing through 2025 and 2026: Reid Tax & Advisory, Larson Gross in Washington State, CWDL in San Diego (which rebranded as Advisent when it joined), Accuity in Hawaii as the 30th partnership, Bowers Advisors in Syracuse, BFJ in St. Paul, and Murphy, Miller & Baglieri in New Jersey, among others. Along the way, Crete hired Leslie Adler, formerly general counsel at Marcum, and brought in Steve Stagner, the former Mattress Firm CEO who had scaled that company from roughly $250 million to over $2.5 billion in revenue before its sale, as chief executive.
Two Thrives, and why the distinction matters
A quick clarification, because the names cause confusion. Thrive Capital is Joshua Kushner's venture firm, one of OpenAI's largest institutional backers. Thrive Holdings is a separate entity that Thrive Capital launched in April 2025 as a permanent-capital holding company. Thrive Holdings takes controlling stakes in traditional services businesses and rebuilds their workflows with AI. Its two operating platforms are Crete (accounting) and Shield Technology Partners (IT services).
In August 2026, Thrive Holdings announced it had raised more than $2 billion in new capital at a $12 billion valuation from D1 Capital Partners, Altimeter Capital, and SoftBank, bringing total capital raised past $3 billion. Reporting around the raise indicated roughly $1 billion was earmarked for the AI-powered accounting roll-up.
Where OpenAI comes in
On December 1, 2025, OpenAI announced it had taken an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings. The structure is unusual. Rather than a straightforward cash investment, OpenAI embeds its own research, product, and engineering teams inside Thrive Holdings' companies and is compensated partly in equity, with a stake that can grow depending on the operational success of those companies. Reuters reported that Thrive Holdings retains ownership of the intellectual property and products created through the joint effort, which is a rare arrangement in AI partnerships, where the model provider usually keeps significant IP rights.
The first public proof point arrived on May 27, 2026, when OpenAI published a case study on Tax AI, a system built over roughly six months by OpenAI's forward-deployed engineers working alongside Thrive's team inside Crete's live production environment. According to OpenAI, the system processed about 7,000 tax returns during the season, primarily 1040 and 1041 filings, drafted returns with up to 97 percent accuracy, saved practitioners about a third of their preparation time, and increased throughput by roughly 50 percent. The system is designed to improve itself: when a human accountant corrects an error, that correction feeds back into the product. Human review and CPA sign-off remain in the loop.
The rebrand
On June 2, 2026, Crete Professionals Alliance rebranded as Current. By then the platform reported nearly 30 partner firms, more than 2,000 employees, and over $500 million in annual revenue, and had been named Accounting Today's fastest-growing firm.
CEO Steve Stagner framed the name change around the belief that AI now lets local firms compete with the largest incumbents and bring what he called Fortune 500-caliber advisory to Main Street businesses. He also drew a deliberate contrast with private equity: "The roll-up playbook is often cost extraction on a deadline. Current's holding period is effectively forever, which allows us to make investments in people, in ways many short-hold owners wouldn't."
What OpenAI actually wants
Reading across the announcements, the strategy has three legs.
First, OpenAI is moving from selling software into owning outcomes. Instead of licensing models to accounting software vendors and collecting a subscription, it takes equity in the operator whose labor its models make more efficient. The margin expansion accrues to the owner, and OpenAI is now an owner.
Second, the firms themselves are the training ground. Accounting runs on proprietary documents, repetitive workflows, and expert judgment. Every correction a Crete accountant makes teaches the system something no outside developer can access. Thrive Holdings has said as much, describing its businesses as bringing together industry expertise and real-world data that can improve models on specific tasks.
Third, this is meant to be repeatable. OpenAI has stated the work is intended to establish a model that can expand across other industries, and Thrive Holdings has already applied the same approach to IT services through Shield and has signaled plans for a third vertical in regulatory services for physical infrastructure.
What this means if you own a firm
For the SMB and lower-middle-market owners we work with at RightExit, here is the practical read.
There is now a genuine third exit path. Alongside staying independent or merging upstream, an owner can sell a majority stake in the non-attest business to a permanent-hold, AI-capitalized platform while keeping the firm's name, leadership, and rollover equity. Whether that path fits you depends heavily on the rollover terms and your confidence in a growth story you will not fully control.
The buyer pool is deeper and more competitive than it has ever been. Capstone Partners' mid-2026 update on accounting services M&A found financial acquirers accounted for 54.8 percent of deal activity, up from 38.9 percent a year earlier, with deal volume up 69.1 percent year over year. Larger firms are increasingly priced on adjusted EBITDA rather than the old one-times-revenue rule of thumb. If you are approached by any platform, Current included, run a real process. Competition is your friend.
Treat the AI numbers as claims, not facts. Tax AI's results are company-reported and specific to one workflow inside one platform. Independent testing tells a more sober story: a benchmark of 19 leading models on 101 real accounting workflows, reported by CFO.com in early 2026, found the top model scored 77 percent. As that report put it, the best model in the world still gets roughly one in five accounting tasks wrong. Ask any AI-forward buyer for firm-level references and independent data before you let the technology story raise or justify a price.
If you stay independent, you can rent much of the same advantage. AI accounting tools are increasingly available by subscription to any firm. Industry observers have pointed out the tension at the heart of this whole thesis: private equity bought accounting firms for durable, recurring compliance revenue, and AI is commoditizing exactly that revenue. The efficiency edge may prove to be a rented advantage rather than a moat, which cuts both ways for buyers and for independents.
The honest caveats
The financial terms of OpenAI's stake in Thrive Holdings have not been disclosed. The venture-scale roll-up thesis is unproven, and integrating dozens of acquired firms is a fundamentally different challenge than building one good AI product. Commentators have also noted this is another of OpenAI's so-called circular deals, in which OpenAI's own backer funds a vehicle OpenAI then takes equity in. Skeptics in the accounting trade press have questioned whether any of this ultimately benefits accounting professionals or the pipeline of future CPAs.
None of that changes the headline for firm owners: the market for accounting practices now includes a class of buyer that did not exist three years ago, backed by more than $3 billion and the most prominent AI company in the world. Whatever you decide about your own exit, you should decide it with that fact on the table.
Thinking through your options? RightExit advises accounting and advisory firm owners on valuation, deal structure, and exit planning. Reach out for a confidential conversation.
Sources
- Business Wire, "Crete Professionals Alliance Reimagines Accounting for the 21st Century," May 2, 2024. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240502417024/en/
- Reuters (Krystal Hu), "Thrive-backed accounting firm Crete to spend $500 million in AI roll-up," June 4, 2025. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/thrive-backed-accounting-firm-crete-130200467.html
- CPA Practice Advisor, "Reid CPAs Joins Forces With Crete Professionals Alliance," April 9, 2024. https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2024/04/09/cpa-firm-reid/103699/
- Business Wire, "CWDL Rebrands as Advisent, Joins Crete," September 18, 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250918925877/en/
- OpenAI, "OpenAI takes an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings to accelerate enterprise AI adoption," December 1, 2025. https://openai.com/index/thrive-holdings/
- Thrive Holdings, "Thrive Holdings x OpenAI," December 1, 2025. https://www.thriveholdings.com/oai_announcement
- Reuters (Kritika Lamba and Krystal Hu), OpenAI stake in Thrive Holdings, December 1, 2025 (syndicated). https://www.manilatimes.net/2025/12/03/business/foreign-business/openai-takes-stake-in-thrive-holdings-in-latest-enterprise-ai-push/2235378
- CNBC, "OpenAI takes stake in Thrive Holdings to help accelerate enterprise AI adoption," December 1, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/01/open-ai-thrive-holdings-enterprise-ai.html
- TechCrunch, "OpenAI's investment into Thrive Holdings is its latest circular deal," December 1, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/01/openais-investment-into-thrive-holdings-is-its-latest-circular-deal/
- OpenAI, "Building self-improving tax agents with Codex," May 27, 2026. https://openai.com/index/building-self-improving-tax-agents-with-codex/
- Business Wire, "Crete Professionals Alliance Rebrands as Current to Equip Independent Accounting Firms to Compete at Enterprise Scale," June 2, 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260602293257/en/
- CPA Practice Advisor, "Crete Professionals Alliance Rebrands as Current," June 3, 2026. https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2026/06/03/crete-professionals-alliance-rebrands-as-current/184461/
- Inside Public Accounting, "Current Rebrands from Crete Professionals Alliance," June 2, 2026. https://insidepublicaccounting.com/2026/06/02/current-rebrands-crete-professionals-alliance/
- Forbes (Anna Tong), "Thrive Holdings To Bet $1 Billion On AI-Powered Accounting Roll-Up," June 2, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/06/02/thrive-holdings-to-bet-1-billion-on-ai-powered-accounting-roll-up/
- TechCrunch, "OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings raises $2B to bring AI to the enterprise," August 12, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/openai-backed-thrive-holdings-raises-2b-to-bring-ai-to-the-enterprise/
- CFO.com, "The best AI model still fails 1 in 5 accounting tasks," February 2026. https://www.cfo.com/news/the-best-ai-model-still-fails-1-in-5-accounting-tasks-Claude-Opus-OpenAI-GPT/818100/
- Footnote, "Private equity bet accounting was a fortress. AI is lowering the walls," July 14, 2026. https://footnote.news/p/private-equity-bet-accounting-was-a-fortress-ai-is-lowering-the-walls
- Going Concern, "OpenAI Gets Into the Accounting Biz." https://www.goingconcern.com/openai-gets-into-the-accounting-biz/
- Capstone Partners, Accounting Services M&A Update, July 2026 (deal volume and buyer mix figures).