A new class of buyers, sometimes called AI roll-ups, is emerging across accounting, property management and customer service. Unlike traditional acquirers, these companies are not buying small service businesses to cut costs or flip them for a quick return. They are buying them to keep the customer relationships already in place, then rebuild the actual work behind those relationships with proprietary artificial intelligence. The wager is that AI does not just make an existing business more efficient. It replaces the work itself, at a scale no individual small business could reach on its own.
The clearest example is in accounting. Current, a company owned by Thrive Holdings, has acquired 48 local accounting firms, PYMNTS reported. OpenAI took an equity stake in Thrive Holdings in December and has since embedded its own engineers inside Thrive’s portfolio companies. Together they built a tax-return processing agent using OpenAI’s Codex, now deployed inside Current, and Thrive executives say their system reaches up to 98% data-entry accuracy in live use, Forbes reported.
A related pilot through Crete Professionals Alliance, a separate Thrive-backed platform with more than $300 million in revenue and over 30 firms, processed 7,000 tax returns with an earlier version of the technology, reaching 97% accuracy and cutting prep time by a third, OpenAI said.
Property Management and Customer Service Are Running the Same Playbook
Dwelly, a London startup, has raised $263 million since February to buy U.K. rental agencies and move them onto one AI platform handling tenant screening, rent collection and maintenance, Tech Funding News reported.
Dwelly now manages more than 15,000 properties and roughly £350 million in annual rent. It says a single property manager can now oversee more than 300 units, up from about 100 before the AI layer.
“Dwelly is AI-first by default: We assume AI should be able to do every operational task,” Dwelly CEO Ilya Drozdov said. “AI takes over the transactional layer, while our people become world-class advisers to landlords and tenants.”
Crescendo is a forerunner of the same model in customer service. The company acquired PartnerHero, a business process outsourcing firm, in 2024 and shifted to outcome-based pricing where clients pay only for resolved tickets rather than agent hours, a departure from an industry that typically runs on 10% to 15% margins, InfoWorld reported.
$6.3 Billion Deal Shows How Far This Model Can Reach
The strategy is no longer confined to small, fragmented businesses. Long Lake Management agreed in May to take American Express Global Business Travel private for $6.3 billion, backed by General Catalyst and Alpha Wave, in what the companies described as the largest deal of its kind to date, Amex GBT announced. Long Lake plans to run the company through Nexus AI, its internal automation platform, while American Express’ brand licensing agreement stays in place.
“The future of business travel will be defined by AI and human agents working seamlessly together on behalf of every traveler,” Long Lake Co-Founder and CEO Alex Taubin said.
That deal reframes the scale this model can reach. Current’s 48 firms, Dwelly’s thousands of properties and Crescendo’s outsourced call centers were each built by acquiring small, independently owned businesses one at a time. Amex GBT reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2025, an entirely different order of magnitude. General Catalyst, one of Long Lake’s backers, is also a major investor in Anthropic.
The bet across all four deals is the same: that rebuilding the production layer with AI, not just consolidating ownership, is what creates value, whether the target is a local accounting practice or a publicly traded company generating billions.
