Teal, a rapidly growing company specializing in accounting infrastructure for Vertical SaaS businesses, announced $8 million in seed funding today. Launched in 2023 by Ian Crosby, former Head of Financial Services at Shopify and CEO and co-founder of Bench Accounting, Teal enables Vertical SaaS businesses to build their accounting suites to offer to their SMB customers. Torch Capital led the funding round with participation from Basis Set Ventures, General Advance, Dash Fund, and angel investors, including executives at Service Titan, Plaid, Brex, Unit, and Gusto.
Teal offers companies the APIs and tools to build their accounting offerings for small business customers, allowing the end-customer SMBs to draw critical insights such as real-time cash flow and per-product profitability, file taxes, and get support from live bookkeepers.
The need for embedded finance for Vertical SaaS is growing exponentially. However, accounting is the number one demanded feature that has not yet been incorporated. The absence of an accounting solution is the top reason for the lack of adoption of financial services features. And by offering software directly within their platforms, Teal’s customers create a financial hub that enhances engagement with the rest of their financial service products like payments, invoices, and banking.
Teal provides a suite of out-of-the-box tools to allow Vertical SaaS companies to launch their accounting platforms in as little as four weeks. These include fully functioning app code repositories and native data integrations with external data sources like Plaid.
KEY QUOTES:
“Teal is building the Stripe for accounting. Just like Stripe provides the underlying infrastructure for Vertical SaaS companies to build payments products, Teal provides the infrastructure for Vertical SaaS companies to build and offer accounting features within their platforms. Having led Bench Accounting, the largest bookkeeping service for SMBs for a decade, I saw firsthand the limitations of standalone accounting software that is not integrated into the rest of a business’ core platform. We built Teal to address this problem.”
– Ian Crosby, Co-Founder and CEO of Teal
“We’re thrilled to be supporting Teal in its mission to revolutionize the accounting space for SMBs. There are 30M+ SMBs in the US, and at Torch, we invest behind the tools and platforms that help their businesses thrive. There’s a huge, dire need for streamlined and intuitive accounting tools, and Teal’s embedded approach, coupled with Ian and team’s proven track record of building standout financial software will address these long standing pain points. Teal’s rapid growth and early success are a testament to this.”
– Katie Reiner, Partner at Torch Capital
