Ahad Ali used to run a busy accounting firm. He managed a team of 20 people and handled more than 2,000 tax returns a year.
His firm did bookkeeping, sales tax, taxes, and general accounting work for clients. It was steady, reliable business.
Over time, Ali grew frustrated with the software his team relied on every day. He felt tools like QuickBooks were not built with accountants in mind.
That frustration led him to a bigger idea. He decided small businesses did not need better accounting software. He believed they needed less of it.
From Accountant to Founder
Ali started building Tabby to test that idea. The product is a real-time bookkeeping platform that handles client paperwork automatically.
Tabby uses Plaid to pull in live account data from a business's bank and financial accounts. It then uses AI to build a live dashboard showing profit and loss.
There is also a version of Tabby made for accounting firms that want an alternative to QuickBooks. Ali said his main focus is reaching small business owners directly.
His long-term goal is to make bookkeeping fully automatic. He wants it to work like a monthly bill, similar to internet or payroll service costs.
"You can say QuickBooks digitized bookkeeping," Ali told TechCrunch, "but we want to make that visible software layer nonexistent."
Fourteen months after launch, Tabby has 5,500 small businesses using the platform. The company reports about $100,000 in annual recurring revenue.
The team behind Tabby is small. It includes Ali, a technical co-founder, four engineers, and one go-to-market specialist.
Tabby is currently raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. The company was also preparing to launch a new feature called Tabby Talk at the time of the interview.
Tabby Talk is a natural language interface for the platform. It lets users interact with their financial data using plain conversation instead of menus or forms.
Competing With QuickBooks and Well-Funded Rivals
Ali knows the accounting software market is crowded. QuickBooks remains the largest player in the space by far.
Newer competitors are also entering the field. Rillet, a startup backed by Sequoia, recently became a unicorn after raising $100 million.
Major AI companies are building their own finance tools as well. Anthropic launched enterprise agent plugins for finance, engineering, and design earlier this year.
Despite the competition, Ali said he sees room for multiple players in the market. He pointed to the sheer number of small businesses that could use the product.
"There's 30 million more businesses," Ali told TechCrunch, explaining why he believes there is still space to grow.
Tabby will be one of the startups featured in the Startup Battlefield 200 competition at TechCrunch Disrupt. The event runs October 13 through 15 in downtown San Francisco.
