Former Accountant Builds Tabby, an AI Bookkeeping Tool Aimed at Replacing QuickBooks
Ahad Ali, a former accountant who oversaw 20 staff and 2,000-plus tax returns a year, is building Tabby, an AI bookkeeping platform that reports 5,500 small-business users and about $100,000 in annual recurring revenue.
Tabby is designed as a real-time bookkeeping interface. It handles clients' paperwork while giving them up-to-the-minute data on profit and loss, using Plaid to import live account data and AI to assemble a dashboard of a business's financial health. Ali told TechCrunch that the idea came from his frustration with accounting software such as QuickBooks, which he said was rarely designed with actual accountants in mind, and with the wider model of SaaS-based accounting. "I realized that small businesses don't need better accounting software," he said. "They need less accounting software. They need something that just does it for them."
There is also a version of Tabby for accounting firms that want a smarter alternative to QuickBooks, but Ali said his goal is to go direct to the end user as often as possible. In his view, products like Tabby can automate bookkeeping work and turn it into a monthly charge on the order of internet access or payroll services. "You can say Quickbooks digitized bookkeeping," he told TechCrunch, "but we want to make [that visible software layer] nonexistent."
Fourteen months in, the company has 5,500 small businesses on the platform and about $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The team remains seven people — Ali, a technical co-founder, four engineers and a go-to-market specialist — and is raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. At the time Ali spoke with TechCrunch, the team was preparing to launch Tabby Talk, a natural language interface for the product.
Competition in accounting software is heavy. QuickBooks remains the largest player, and Ali also faces well-funded startups such as the Sequoia-backed Rillet, along with finance tools built by the major AI labs. He said Tabby can carve out a niche by focusing on the small and medium-sized firms that supported his own accounting business. "Everything we see is making us believe that there's a path for other players, because the space is big," he told TechCrunch. "There's 30 million more businesses."