Former accountant's startup Tabby uses AI to do small-business bookkeeping

From accounting practice to startup

In May 2025, Ahad Ali ran a conventional accounting firm: twenty staff, more than 2,000 returns a year, and a full menu of services spanning bookkeeping, accounting, sales tax and tax filing, according to TechCrunch. The business was stable, but Ali grew increasingly frustrated at how his work bent around the frictions of tools like QuickBooks, and eventually with SaaS-based accounting as a whole.

His takeaway, as he told TechCrunch, was that small businesses don't want better accounting software; they want less of it, and something that simply handles the work on its own. That idea became Tabby.

What Tabby does

Tabby positions itself not as another accounting app but as a service that does the books. Per TechCrunch, it pulls live account data through Plaid and uses AI to maintain a continuously updated dashboard of a business's profit, loss and overall financial health, processing client paperwork as it arrives rather than in periodic batches.

There is a version aimed at accounting firms looking for a smarter alternative to QuickBooks, but TechCrunch reports that Ali prefers selling directly to the end customer wherever possible. The stated ambition is to automate bookkeeping outright and sell it as a routine monthly utility, priced on the order of internet access or payroll services rather than as software the customer has to operate. Ali's framing: QuickBooks digitized bookkeeping, while Tabby wants that visible software layer to stop existing altogether.

Early numbers

Fourteen months in, Tabby counts 5,500 small businesses as customers and roughly $100,000 in annual recurring revenue, according to TechCrunch. The team is still just seven people — Ali, a technical co-founder, four engineers and a go-to-market specialist — and the company is in the process of raising a $1 million pre-seed round.

A natural-language interface for the product, called Tabby Talk, was being prepared for launch at the time TechCrunch spoke with Ali.

A crowded market

The competitive picture is steep. TechCrunch notes that QuickBooks remains the biggest incumbent, while Tabby will also face well-funded startups such as the Sequoia-backed Rillet, along with finance tools from the major AI labs. Ali argues there is room for new entrants because the market is vast — he points to what he describes as 30 million more businesses out there — and his plan is to focus on the same small and mid-sized firms that sustained his old practice.

Tabby is competing in TechCrunch's Battlefield competition at Disrupt, which runs October 13–15 in downtown San Francisco.

Why it matters

Tabby is a concrete test of whether AI can absorb an entire back-office function rather than merely assist with it. The figures are early — $100,000 in annual recurring revenue spread across 5,500 customers implies very little revenue per business — and the company is still pre-seed, so the model is far from proven. But the direction of travel is clear: if AI can reliably keep books from live bank data, a service that small businesses currently pay professionals for could collapse into a flat monthly fee. That puts pressure on incumbents like QuickBooks on one side and on accounting practices on the other, and Ali himself is a striking example of the shift — a practitioner who built a career doing this work by hand and is now trying to automate it away.