Company: Balance, an AI-native accounting firm for SMBs
Problem: Provisioning inboxes programmatically and at scale, with whitelists and blacklists controlling who can contact each client's Bea inbox and which addresses Bea can send to
Result: Half a day of engineering per inbox reduced to a single API call. EU inboxes in Frankfurt live within 48 hours of first contact. Thousands of emails handled between clients and their Bea agent.
Stack: AgentMail + Balance
What Balance Is
Balance is an AI-native accounting firm for SMBs. They deliver faster, more accurate service at a fraction of the price because their AI agents handle the grunt work and rope in human accountants where judgment is needed, like the final sign-off on month-end books. They have 50+ customers across Europe and have been growing 40% month-on-month.
A core part of how they deliver this is Bea, their client-facing AI accountant. Bea meets customers where they work, from WhatsApp to Slack to email, answering and actioning requests 24/7. Email is a very common channel through which SMBs contact their accountants, which is why ensuring Bea has access in a scalable, isolated, and secure manner was paramount.
The Problem
Balance needed to provision inboxes programmatically and at scale, with the configuration that handling sensitive financial data demands: whitelists and blacklists controlling who can contact each client's Bea inbox, and which addresses Bea can send to.
The alternative they had been working on was provisioning inboxes in Google Workspace and using client-level organisation units to control who could contact each one. Domain restrictions were painful. The webhook implementation was not straightforward. Google Pub/Sub setup added more complexity. They started building it before realising it would be a huge sink on engineering resources to get it to scale.
Why AgentMail
AgentMail did out of the box what they had started building themselves. Programmatic inboxes via a clean API, whitelists and blacklists enforced at the infrastructure layer, and EU hosting in Frankfurt for GDPR. They went from evaluating to integrated in an afternoon.
"AgentMail enforces all of this at the infrastructure layer rather than in our application code, which is exactly where it should sit when financial data is involved," said Gus Levinson, Founder at Balance.
Their customers were asking for email support with Bea and they wanted to move fast. They came across AgentMail and messaged Adi. He replied in two minutes, jumped on a call 15 minutes later, and they were set up with a test org and implementing that afternoon. Within 48 hours they had EU inboxes in Frankfurt for GDPR.
"At Balance, our AI accountant Bea meets customers where they work, and email is an essential channel. When you're handling financial data, privacy and security are non-negotiable. AgentMail gave us watertight whitelists, programmatic inboxes, and EU hosting within 48 hours of first contact."
Gus Levinson, Founder, Balance
The Numbers
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Provisioning a new inbox | Half a day of engineering | Single API call |
| Whitelist/blacklist enforcement | Hand-rolled in application code | Infrastructure layer |
| First contact to EU production | N/A | 48 hours |
Thousands of emails handled between customers and their Bea agent since going live.
Products used:
- Programmatic inboxes
- Send and Receive Messages
- Webhooks
- WebSockets
- Threaded conversations
- Structured data extraction from emails
- Multi-tenancy and custom domains
- Drafts
- Attachments
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