In May of 2025, Ahad Ali was a successful accountant, overseeing a team of 20 people and handling more than 2,000 returns a year. \u201cWe did bookkeeping, accounting, sales tax, taxes, everything,\u201d Ali says. It was a stable business, and one that would have been easy to stay in.<\/p>\n
But Ali started to notice something. His work was increasingly dictated by the frictions of accounting software, which was rarely designed with actual accountants in mind. He became frustrated with specific accounting software like QuickBooks, and soon he became frustrated with the entire idea of SaaS-based accounting.<\/p>\n
\u201cI realized that small businesses don\u2019t need better accounting software,\u201d Ali told TechCrunch. \u201cThey need less accounting software. They need something that just does it for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, Ali is building just that. His product, Tabby<\/a>, is designed to be a real-time bookkeeping interface, handling clients\u2019 paperwork as it gives them up-to-the-minute data on their business\u2019s profit and loss. Using Plaid to import live account data, Tabby uses AI to quickly build a real-time dashboard for a business\u2019s financial health.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a version of Tabby for accounting firms that want a smarter alternative to Quickbooks, but Ali\u2019s goal is to go direct to the end user as often as possible. As Ali sees it, products like Tabby have a chance to automate away the work of bookkeeping once and for all, turning it into a monthly charge on the order of internet access or payroll services. If successful, it could seriously change the calculus of operating a small business.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can say Quickbooks digitized bookkeeping,\u201d Ali told TechCrunch, \u201cbut we want to make [that visible software layer] nonexistent.\u201d<\/p>\n So far, it seems to be working. Fourteen months in, Tabby has 5,500 small businesses using the platform, with roughly $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The team is still just seven people \u2014 Ali, his technical co-founder, four engineers and a go-to-market specialist \u2014 and in the process of raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. When I spoke to Ali, his team was just preparing to launch Tabby Talk, a natural language interface for the product.<\/p>\n There\u2019s plenty of competition in the accounting space, particularly now that AI has shaken up the ___. Ali has his eyes focused on Quickbooks, which is still the biggest player \u2014 but he\u2019ll also be facing well-funded startups like the Sequoia-backed Rillet<\/a>, as well as the major labs\u2019 own finance tools<\/a>. It\u2019s a daunting task, but Ali thinks that Tabby can carve out a niche by focusing on the same small-to-medium-sized firms that helped his accounting business thrive.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything we see is making us believe that there\u2019s a path for other players, because the space is big,\u201d Ali told TechCrunch. \u201cThere\u2019s 30 million more businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n Learn more about Tabby and the other innovative startups involved in our prestigious Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt, happening October 13-15<\/a> in downtown San Francisco.<\/p>\n