Our Story
The UpLink team has a vision to make work more enjoyable for the millions of accountants and auditors around the world.
After building software for large companies for many years, they each saw the transformational impact great software can have on the day-to-day operations of an engagement team. They came together to create UpLink as the first step toward that vision. Here’s the story:
Alex Maher and Alex Grant each worked at PwC for nearly a decade. After starting out as CPAs in the IT Audit practice, they both transitioned to software development. They met on the team building Halo, PwC’s big data analytics platform and bonded over their shared passion for developing high quality software that solves real world problems and a good Old Fashioned.
In their early days of IT auditing, they both experienced the daily tedium of manually reconciling the list of items that must be provided by the client (aka the "PBC"), with the dozens of email attachments that arrived every few hours at the outset of a new engagement. It’s a time consuming but important task because delays in documents provided by the client can have a major impact delivering the project on time.
Alex and Alex teamed up with the best developers they have ever worked with, Nick and Brady, to build UpLink, allowing businesses of all sizes to have access to software that was custom built for managing the client document request process—created by people who know and have experienced the problem firsthand.
Meet the UpLink Team
Alex Maher
After graduating from the University of Florida with a Master of Accounting, Alex started his career as a CPA at PwC in New York auditing the IT departments of some of the largest banks in the world. On nights and weekends, he taught himself how to code. Several years later, he transitioned into software development, leading some of the highest performing development teams at the firm who were responsible for building significant parts of the Halo analytics platform.
After leaving PwC, he went to work at a large telecom construction company leading four teams responsible for building the company’s next generation field data collection platform, which is used daily by thousands of employees and subcontractors for mission critical work. He left to pursue his dream of starting his own company focused on building world-class software and making it available to companies of all sizes.
Somewhere during all that, he married his college sweetheart, Laura, and moved back to Florida, where they raise their two young sons, Brooks and Jack.
Nick Yarmesch
Ever since he can remember, Nick has been interested in technology. His idea of fun includes reading technical manuals for microcontrollers and reverse engineering the barcodes on Nespresso capsules.
In college, he built the hardware and developed the software to retrofit his 2002 Lexus with a secure receiver that unlocked his car when he approached wearing his Apple Watch.
After graduating with his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Florida, Nick was recruited by Brady to join Dycom, where he worked on building scalable and secure data processing applications using event driven architecture and modern development best practices. Nick left Dycom to start UpLink in 2022.
You’re most likely to run into Nick in his blue Cayman on the trip between his house and Starbucks.
Alex Grant
After graduating with his Master of Accounting from the University of Maryland, Alex Grant started his career as CPA at PwC in IT Audit. After a few years, he decided to switch career tracks and began writing software for PwC.
Since then, Alex Grant has worked on many enterprise projects within PwC, including authoring the developer SDK for PwC’s Halo Analytics platform, as well as working on the backend analytics processing engine. Most recently, he was the lead software engineer on PwC Extract, which is a secure data extraction system for collecting client business and financial data used in audits.
Alex Grant left PwC to start UpLink with the rest of the team because he wanted the challenge and because he wants to democratize the capabilities of software currently only available to the largest firms.
To avoid confusion at work, he and Alex Maher both go by their last names. But unlike Maher, he kept his CPA license active. Alex Grant lives in Maryland with his wife Jen, and their new Golden Retriever puppy, Theo.
Brady Ochse
Brady is passionate about building great software, which stems from the personal satisfaction of a job well done and the positive impact that great software can have on people around the world.
Brady earned a 4.0 in Computer Science from the University of Florida, where he also met Nick. As top students in the program, the two became fast friends.
After graduating with his B.S., Brady began working at Dycom, where his problem-solving skills and leadership ability earned him quick promotions and a reputation for writing great code quickly.
While at Dycom, software architects and lead engineers would often seek his advice when designing new solutions. Ultimately, Brady wanted the software he built to be accessible to people and companies who couldn’t afford to hire an entire team of engineers, so he left to start UpLink.
Brady lives with his girlfriend, Jessie, and their cat, Song.