Cotrugl

Every small business runs on a back office it doesn't staff.

Bookkeeping, payroll, IT, legal — the compliance work that keeps a business running is the work no owner has time for. It gets done late, done poorly, or not at all. The way in is the books: high-trust, decent-margin — and still largely done by hand.

The window just opened — on three fronts at once.

The work became automatable at the same moment the firms came up for sale and the incumbents ran out of answers. That overlap is the opening.

Buy the firm. Keep the brand. Run it on the ledger.

We acquire established bookkeeping firms with sticky client bases, then migrate their back office onto the Cotrugli agentic ledger. Clients keep the firm they trust; we replace the manual cost base underneath it.

The agentic ledger

Feeds in. The agent reconciles and drafts. A human reviews and lodges. Nothing is hidden: every action carries a rationale and a confidence score.

1. 01 · Feeds Feeds land

   Bank, payroll, and invoice feeds arrive continuously.

2. Agent Reconcile & draft

   The agent reconciles, categorises, and drafts BAS, each with a confidence score.

3. 03 · Review Human signs off

   A registered agent reviews the exceptions and approves.

4. 04 · Lodge Lodged to the ATO

   Submitted with a full audit trail retained.

The model compounds with every firm.

Placeholder figures: replace with the live model.

A proven team, a decade deep in this exact category.

Two founders who have built, sold, and operated in the small-business / Xero ecosystem for fifteen years — and shipped AI at scale in regulated finance. Cotrugli is the pattern they already know, done right.

Co-founder

Josh Foreman

~15 years in the small-business and Xero ecosystem. Built and exited two businesses in this exact category — Consultive, Australia's largest external Xero training partner (thousands of SMBs, bookkeepers and accountants trained), and Pocket, a software-led Sydney bookkeeping firm: the pre-AI version of the firms Cotrugli now acquires.

Also founded InDebted — a global, AI-native financial platform.

Co-founder

Pierre Bergamin

15+ years of engineering leadership building and scaling agentic AI platforms in production across regulated financial services. Earlier, senior engineering leadership at Assignar and Learnosity. He builds the agentic platform that runs every firm Cotrugli acquires.

Most recently CTO of InDebted, scaling AI across nine markets.

One round. One firm. One unfakeable proof point.

A small, focused pre-seed that buys a single decisive result: take a real Australian bookkeeping firm and roughly double its EBITDA margin on the agentic ledger — the proof that de-risks everything after it.