C Cotrugl 01 / 00
Pre-seed pitch

Cotrugl

The AI operating system for small business.

Confidential

The problem

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.

Statutory Near-universalEvery business must keep books. It isn't optional.
Recurring Non-discretionaryEvery dollar in and out, every week — not a one-off.
Structured Fully structured dataThe cleanest substrate an agent could run on.
Why now

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.

01
AI can finally do the work

Frontier models categorise, reconcile, detect exceptions and extract documents at near-human accuracy — with no bespoke ML per client. A research problem in 2023; an engineering problem in 2026.

02
The firms are coming up for sale

Bookkeeping-firm owners are ageing out with no succession. Established, recurring client books are acquirable now, at roughly 1× revenue.

03
The incumbents have no answer

The SaaS-era platforms — Xero, QuickBooks — are losing ground, with no credible AI-native strategy. The layer that runs the business is up for grabs.

What we do

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.

01
Acquire

Profitable AU firms, recurring revenue, owner seeking exit or succession.

02
Transform

Migrate onto the agentic ledger: reconcile in minutes, BAS in seconds.

03
Compound

Margin expands per firm; each acquisition makes the system better.

How it works

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 numbers

The model compounds with every firm.

MetricTodayTarget · FY27
Firms acquired0N
ARR, recurring$0.0m$0.0m
Gross margin, post-transform00%00%
Acquisition multiple, EBITDA0.0×0.0×

Placeholder figures: replace with the live model.

Why us

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.

Josh Foreman, co-founder of Cotrugli — smiling, wearing a white shirt.
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.

Pierre Bergamin, co-founder of Cotrugli — wearing a cap and glasses against a navy background.
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.

The ask

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.

$3M ≈ A$4M+
Stage
Pre-seed · stealth
Instrument
YC post-money SAFE
Where it goes
  • Acquire the firm Majority First Australian bookkeeping firm — profitable, recurring, sticky clients.
  • Build the platform Build The proprietary agentic ledger that replaces the manual cost base.
  • Runway & team Runway Operate the firm through the transformation, BAS sign-off retained.
What it buys

Margin transformation on one real firm ~ EBITDA margin, exiting with $2M+ recurring, profitable revenue.

Revenue-backed, not a forecast — the proof point that sets up a strong next round.