Accounting finance ops

Magnetic

Website

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.

Founded 2024Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

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.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08

Founders & team

Thomas Shelley

Founder/CEO

Thomas is the co-founder and CEO of Magnetic. He was most recently Head of Product at Keeper (YC W19), where he designed tax engine automation and OCR tax doc scanning systems for the world's first consumer AI tax filing product. Previously, Thomas ran product teams at Niantic and Zynga, and before that dropped out of Carnegie Mellon to build a digital item marketplace.

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Patrick Fay

Founder/CTO

Patrick is the co-founder and CTO of Magnetic. He was the first engineer at FunCraft, where he shipped 14 new games in four years, including two multi-million dollar hits. Patrick led multiple engineering teams at Zynga, and was ranked #1 in the world for DotA Underlords Duos.

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
10team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2024 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthverified profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Not assessed · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The latest capture is empty, blocked or a parked website.

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Stage definitions
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