Former Accountant Builds AI Tool Tabby to Take the Work Out of Bookkeeping

Ahad Ali spent years running a thriving accounting practice, overseeing 20 people and more than 2,000 tax returns a year. But the software he relied on frustrated him - tools like QuickBooks, he felt, were built without real accountants in mind. That frustration grew into a bigger idea: small businesses don't need better accounting software, they need less of it.

So Ali left his practice behind and built Tabby, a real-time bookkeeping interface that imports live account data through Plaid and uses AI to give business owners an up-to-the-minute picture of their profit and loss. There's also a version aimed at accounting firms looking for an alternative to QuickBooks, though Ali prefers selling directly to end users. His ambition is to make the visible software layer of bookkeeping disappear entirely, turning it into a simple monthly charge.

Fourteen months in, Tabby reports 5,500 small businesses on the platform and roughly $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The team is still just seven people - Ali, a technical co-founder, four engineers and a go-to-market specialist - and is raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. The company was preparing to launch Tabby Talk, a natural language interface, when Ali spoke to TechCrunch.

Competition is heavy, from QuickBooks to Sequoia-backed Rillet and the major labs' own finance tools. Ali believes there's room anyway. "The space is big," he said. "There's 30 million more businesses."