Toronto-based Blue J raised US$176 million in new investment led by AI and software investor JMI Equity, as it expands its artificial intelligence workflow business.

The company, which makes an AI chatbot that helps accountants, lawyers and auditors check tax rules, saw its valuation more than double in the Series E round to over US$700 million, or over $1 billion, up from roughly US$300 million when it last raised money in August 2025.

Blue J, which started as a legaltech company in 2015, launched a large language model product focused on tax in 2023, then made it their flagship product. The company has seen revenue increase 529 per cent since, it said. Its customer base has risen from about 2,500 to 6,500 firms since last year’s raise, and by the end of this year its workforce will have risen from 80 to nearly 200, with a large share of hiring happening in Toronto, CEO Benjamin Alarie said. 

It’s a sign that the sleepy world of accounting has become a target for artificial intelligence investors. The number of AI startups in the “CFO stack,” which includes expenses, compliance and tax, outpaces all other areas of fintech, including wealth management, financial services, capital markets and payments, according to 2025 PitchBook data.

Jack Duane, principal at JMI, which is a new investor in Blue J, said he sees an opening in the tax industry for companies like Blue J that have an established track record but remain “extremely AI-forward.”

“There is a tremendous openness to bringing in new technology” among both big and small tax firms at the moment, Duane said.

Blue J is building more AI-powered workflows with its new funding, releasing tools that can generate client communications and responses to U.S. IRS requests, or analyze trust agreements. It also struck a deal last month to integrate its product into Swedish legaltech company Legora’s agentic AI platform.

It isn’t the only company going after the market. Toronto-based Thomson Reuters announced late last month that it was updating its chatbot product, CoCounsel, to execute tax-related agentic workflows, like generating spreadsheets.

“Receipts and income statements and bank statements and charitable donations and so on and so forth. That document ingestion, that information ingestion, is incredibly time-consuming,” Thomson Reuters CEO Steve Hasker told The Logic in an interview last week.

As “the number of tax returns goes up, the complexity of those tax returns goes up, and the number of audits goes up, and the complexity of those audits goes up,” Hasker said. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. But Hasker argued that the U.S. and Canadian economies actually have a “significant gap” of accounting talent. 

Alarie agreed that he doesn’t see a massive simplification of tax laws in the near future, though he argued that could also reflect changes that make the rules more fair.

“If anything, the law will become more complex and deeper, more specified, and that will simply underscore the importance of using the most trusted tools in order to navigate that increased complexity,” he said.

Both companies count big accounting firms among their top clients, which themselves are investing heavily in internal AI tools, despite snafus where companies like EY and Deloitte have been caught publishing AI hallucinations in their consulting arms. RSM said last year it would plunge US$1 billion into an in-house tax workflow platform by 2028, while EY said its US$1.4-billion AI agent rollout started with its tax business.

“Firms want to have access to the best technology, and they’re going to buy certain things and they’ll build others,” said Duane, adding that when it comes to tax research and workflows specifically, “we think Blue J is very well-positioned.”