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Magnetic

Active · AI Tax Preparer for CPA firms

11signal of 100 · rising 8
  • team of 10Team size · YC's directory+5.4
  • went through YCProgram · this site+4
  • hiringHiring · Titles (titles.fru.dev), YC+2

A sum of public facts, not a judgement and not investment advice.

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Founders

  • Thomas ShelleyFounder/CEO
  • Patrick FayFounder/CTO

About Magnetic

Magnetic scans client documents - from handwritten charity notes to excel spreadsheet Schedule Cs to multi-state K-1s - and enters them into tax software automatically, saving hours of tedious data entry. The accounting profession is facing a massive talent shortage, as graduates choose different professions and the old guard begins to retire. As a result, CPA and tax preparation firms are awash in clientele, but unable to keep up. At many firms, phones go unanswered, clients are "fired", and websites are taken down, as the existing workforce tries to handle the grueling 80 hour+ weeks necessary to push through tax season to the April 15th deadline. We built this because a former colleague who owns her own tax firm asked us to automate her workload, and we quickly realized the massive opportunity. Thomas brings deep domain expertise as the former Head of Product at Keeper (YC W19), where he built tax engine automation systems and an OCR form scanning system that outperformed everything else on the market. At Keeper, he leveraged early access to OpenAI's LLMs (well before ChatGPT) to build systems that automated the entire tax filing process, allowing a tiny team of CPAs to process thousands of returns with near zero busy work. Patrick was the first engineer at FunCraft, shipping multiple mobile games with 1M+ downloads and building scalable shared codebases. We've worked together since 2017, including co-leading multiple teams at Zynga as PM & Tech Lead respectively. The opportunity is massive - there are 80M US personal tax returns filed via professionals annually, in a $2B outsourcing market where individual CPA firms currently pay $100k-$1M per year for inferior services. We're positioned to capture significant market share by offering better accuracy & document coverage, instant processing, and superior user experience. We've built this kind of software before, we've worked together for years (and even lived together), we've built products to $10M ARR before, and we have the grit to outwork anyone in this space.

YC batch
S25 · Summer 2025
Status, per YC
Active
Category
AI, Developer tools
Team size
10
Location
San Francisco, CA, USA
Founded
2024
Checked
6h ago

Magnetic in S25: 166 companies, 92% AI

LinkedIn

Magnetic: questions

Which YC batch was Magnetic in?

Magnetic was in Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch (S25).

Is Magnetic still active?

Y Combinator lists Magnetic as active.

Who founded Magnetic?

Magnetic's founders, as listed on its YC page: Thomas Shelley (Founder/CEO), Patrick Fay (Founder/CTO).

Where is Magnetic based?

Magnetic lists San Francisco, CA, USA as its location on YC's directory.