Synthetic announced it has raised $10 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures. Additional participants in the round included Basis Set Ventures along with operator-investors Tobi Lütke, Kaz Nejatian, Zach Abrams, Cosmin Nicolaescu, and Michael Tannenbaum.
The company is building an AI-powered bookkeeping service focused exclusively on software startups, SaaS companies, and AI businesses. Synthetic said the platform is designed to operate without human bookkeepers or accountants by connecting directly to customer banking, payroll, billing, and inbox systems, while generating clarifying questions to better understand business context before producing accrual-basis financial books.
Synthetic said pricing for the service will begin at $49 per month, positioning it at roughly one-quarter of the cost of traditional human-staffed bookkeeping services. The company emphasized that it is currently iterating on its product with early design customers and plans to initially focus on smaller software businesses before expanding to larger clients.
The company was founded by Ian Crosby, who previously co-founded Bench Accounting in 2012 and helped scale it into one of the largest bookkeeping services for small businesses in North America. Synthetic said Crosby launched the company with the belief that the traditional human-staffed bookkeeping model faces limitations in price, speed, and availability that AI can eventually overcome.
Synthetic added that its broader long-term vision extends beyond bookkeeping and accounting. The company said it ultimately wants founders to be able to launch software businesses through fully automated operational infrastructure, including incorporation, banking, payments, accounting, and other business functions.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco and said it is hiring engineers globally while sponsoring visas for qualified candidates.
KEY QUOTES:
“Building a truly autonomous AI that helps founders is something worth building, and I’d rather we build something novel and useful than something easy.”
“I’m not sure if it’s yet technologically possible to make this work. AI is notoriously unreliable, and no one wants to entrust their accounting to a system which might get it wrong. Our focus is on quality control and we’re not going to release this until we feel confident that it’s more reliable than a human bookkeeper. I’m not sure if that’s going to be 6 months or 6 years. But building a truly autonomous AI that helps founders is something worth building, and I’d rather we build something novel and useful than something easy.”
Ian Crosby, Founder and CEO, Synthetic
“This one’s quite simple. You have a large, valuable problem that will inevitably be solved by AI. A founder who’s spent multiple decades working on the problem with near perfect founder market fit. And resilience and grit that’s been forged through multiple founding experiences and scale ups at companies like Shopify and Mercury. What more can one really ask for here?”
Jon Chu, Khosla Ventures
