KPMG acquires PrivateBlok, team will support AI developments

Big Four KPMG announced that the employees and founders of AI development platform PrivateBlok will be joining the firm and will help it further scale its AI capacities. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

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“We’re thrilled to join KPMG to help pair KPMG’s industry expertise with practical AI agents to solve real client problems — finance, change, diligence — right now,” said PrivateBlok CEO Sachin Manchanda. 

PrivateBlok specializes in developing configurable multi-agent systems that integrate public and proprietary data into a secure knowledge base with AI-powered copilot capabilities for corporate clients. With the addition of PrivateBlok’s talented team, KPMG is expanding its own capacity to offer multi-model agent layer capabilities to clients. The team will also support KPMG’s ongoing efforts to build multi-agent systems that embed agents seamlessly into the way its people work.

“The addition of the PrivateBlok team means that KPMG will be able to build AI-first products that deliver greater value to our clients — and support them for the long haul,” said Patrick Ryan, national managing partner for advisory strategy and markets at KPMG, in a statement. “This is about speed and impact: world-class multi-agent expertise inside KPMG so clients see better outcomes, sooner.”

In a later email, Ryan told Accounting Today that while PrivateBlok has an AI development platform, the focus of the acquisition was more the talent than the tech, as KPMG already has a well-developed AI infrastructure that includes platforms like KPMG Workbench, as well as its AI-native Clara audit platform and Digital Gateway.

“We acquired the deep expertise of the architects and innovators who built PrivateBlok’s system. Their role is to apply their specialized knowledge in multi-agent and AI-native development directly to KPMG’s existing ecosystem — helping us build new, differentiated AI-first products faster and scale multi-agent capabilities across the firm,” he said in an email. 

Rather than working on a single isolated project, he said the team will work across KPMG’s AI initiatives, designing the multi-agent architectures to aid in the development of production-ready assets that integrate seamlessly into client workflows. The addition is a structural expansion of the firm’s Advisory AI Products organization. He added that the PrivateBlok team will focus on “industrializing” the firm’s AI capabilities — building the reusable agent layer that allows it to embed intelligence into its services at scale.

As opposed to a new direction, he described the move as a way to supercharge a central pillar of KPMG’s innovation strategy, namely “aggressively defining the market for AI-native products and services.” 

“As the market shifts toward buying and operationalizing AI systems, we are moving quickly to build an ecosystem of prebuilt vertical AI products, managed services and enterprise-grade governance. This team adds critical velocity to that mission — helping us translate innovation into production-ready assets that scale across industries, reinforcing our shift toward more flexible, subscription-based commercial models,” Ryan said. 

Novistra Capital served as exclusive financial advisors to PrivateBlok.