Customer Story
Combinely automates client communications for thousands of accountants with Perplexity's API
Perplexity Sonar Pro API
Metrics
30% more client queries answered with AI
10+ hours saved weekly per end-user
Improved client response times and satisfaction
"Perplexity's Sonar Pro API empowers our end-users to automate client communications at scale. Its ability to analyze emails and generate data-backed, cited responses in minutes saves them hours per day while significantly improving client satisfaction.”
Arthur Granacher, Co-founder and CTO at Combinely
Combinely is a Y Combinator-backed technology startup founded by former accountants and engineers from Google, Shazam, and Deloitte. The startup is well-known for its AI co-workers, which assist accounting professionals by answering client queries, reviewing documents, and producing deliverables automatically. Combinely was selected for London Business School's 2024/2025 Incubator Programme for its potential to transform professional services decision-making through AI insights.
The Task
Automating client communications for end-users while ensuring trustworthiness
How do you automate nuanced accounting guidance without compromising accuracy or privacy? That was the challenge Combinely Co-founder and CTO Arthur Granacher faced as he built the company's AI co-workers.
Arthur was keenly aware that accountants frequently fielded questions from clients about property sales, capital gains, and income thresholds. Because these questions often required deep research and answers tailored to each client's unique financial situation, communications consumed hours of each accountant’s already limited time. Arthur knew Combinely's AI co-workers could eliminate this pain point and help accountants buy back time to nurture client relationships by crafting automated responses on their behalf.
To make this a reality, Combinely's MVP leveraged internal notes, tax documents, and state-specific resources to personalize automated responses to client emails. However, these knowledge sources were fragmented and quickly out of date.
"Compiling any missing information or fact-checking policies was a frustrating, manual, and time-consuming process," Arthur explains. But without these additional insights, drafts risked sounding generic or being inaccurate, and risk-averse accountants wouldn't feel comfortable sharing the answers with their clients.
Arthur first explored expanding Combinely's internal documentation to fix this problem. However, he soon realized that maintaining a comprehensive, up-to-date financial knowledge base was a full-time job and wouldn't be sustainable. So, he began looking for a third-party API that could index the public web, pull the latest information, and use it to generate comprehensive answers to client questions automatically.
The API would need to be:
Accurate
Financial regulations shift annually, and small nuances based on a client’s location or profile can dramatically change their tax obligation. Without on-demand, up-to-date information, even routine questions become research projects, eating into billable hours while increasing the risk of error.
Authoritative
Not all sources carry equal weight. For instance, information pulled directly from a government domain should be trusted above all else. So, accountants would need to know where the research backing their answers was coming from. Without control over which sources to prioritize, results become too broad — or unreliable — to be useful.
Secure
Accountants work with sensitive documents that include income, property history, and investment data. Because of this, privacy isn't a nice-to-have; it's mission-critical. Arthur needed an API that wouldn't retain or share client data with external parties.
The Solution
Delivering accurate, automated, personalized client responses at scale
Perplexity’s Sonar Pro API provided exactly what Arthur needed to automate client communications for Combinely’s end-users — without his team needing to maintain comprehensive financial knowledge in-house. Even better, Perplexity’s Startup Program made it easy for Arthur to get up and running, a key advantage for a fast-moving company.
By indexing the public web in real time, Sonar Pro empowers Combinely to “expand the depth of client questions the co-workers can help address,” Arthur shares. Now, accountants using the solution can deliver even more responsive client service.
Comprehensive answers, personalized to each client’s needs
With Sonar Pro, Combinely’s end-users can answer client questions with comprehensive, personalized responses in minutes. To do this, Combinely’s AI co-workers start by automatically scanning incoming emails, extracting client questions, and referencing internal resources to build a skeletonized response. Then, Sonar Pro indexes the public web in real time to complete the draft with cited and up-to-date insights.
Arthur notes that Sonar Pro’s industry-leading reasoning capabilities ensure only the most relevant information makes its way to clients. As the API combs through internal documentation and the public web, it evaluates the relevance and reliability of all sources — focusing wholly on those aligned with the client’s original query.
"Since introducing the Sonar Pro API to power our AI co-workers, Combinely saves accountants roughly two hours per day," Arthur says. "Whenever accountants get a client email, they now have a comprehensive and personalized response drafted within a minute."
Best of all, Perplexity presents every answer in natural language, so anyone (regardless of their financial fluency) can understand it. As a result, accountants can be confident that their clients will trust the delivered information every time.
Enterprise-grade protection of client data
With Sonar Pro, automation doesn’t come at the cost of security. Unlike other APIs Arthur considered, Sonar Pro doesn’t train its LLMs on data uploaded by Combinely’s end-users. This means any sensitive or personally identifiable information used to draft client responses remains within the accountant's control.
Arthur also notes that Perplexity’s Data Retention Policy — which automatically deletes any uploaded files after seven days — plays a major role in ensuring sensitive client data doesn’t spread across the accounting stack. This was a crucial value add for accountants who were hesitant to adopt AI for fear of further data fragmentation.
Plus, with Sonar Pro offering SOC II and GDPR compliance out of the box, accountants can automate client communications while ensuring alignment with evolving consumer data privacy regulations.
“Privacy is super important when creating a product for accountants,” Arthur says. “Perplexity’s comprehensive approach to securing client data made onboarding risk-averse users that much smoother.”
The Result
Empowering accountants to drive client satisfaction and get more done
With Sonar Pro, Arthur not only delivered on his original vision for AI co-workers, but also expanded Combinely’s core offering much faster than he could have achieved in-house.
"From a speed and performance perspective, Sonar is the best out there," Arthur says. "The API has allowed us to scale much quicker than if we had committed to an in-house build."
The dividends of automated client communications have been substantial. With each user saving 10 hours per week on average, they can reinvest that time into building stronger relationships with their clients — or providing bespoke support to their largest accounts. Arthur notes that having the bandwidth for either of these tasks in an increasingly competitive accounting landscape is “priceless.”
