In May 2025, Ahad Ali managed a stable accounting firm with 20 staff members and over 2,000 annual returns. The business handled bookkeeping, sales tax, and everything else. It was a role he could have easily kept.
Ali began to notice a problem. His work was increasingly dictated by the friction of accounting software, which was rarely designed with actual accountants in mind. He became frustrated with specific tools like QuickBooks and soon grew frustrated with the entire idea of SaaS-based accounting.
“I realized that small businesses don’t need better accounting software,” Ali told TechCrunch. “They need less accounting software. They need something that just does it for them.”
Now Ali is building just that. His product, Tabby, is designed as a real-time bookkeeping interface. It handles clients’ paperwork while giving them up-to-the-minute data on their business’s profit and loss. Using Plaid to import live account data, Tabby uses AI to quickly build a real-time dashboard for a business’s financial health.
There is also a version of Tabby for accounting firms that want a smarter alternative to QuickBooks, but Ali’s goal is to go direct to the end user as often as possible. As Ali sees it, products like Tabby have a chance to automate away the work of bookkeeping once and for all, turning it into a monthly charge on the order of internet access or payroll services. If successful, it could seriously change the calculus of operating a small business.
“You can say QuickBooks digitized bookkeeping,” Ali told TechCrunch, “but we want to make that visible software layer nonexistent.”
So far, it seems to be working. Fourteen months in, Tabby has 5,500 small businesses using the platform, with roughly $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The team is still just seven people — Ali, his technical co-founder, four engineers and a go-to-market specialist — and is in the process of raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. When I spoke to Ali, his team was just preparing to launch Tabby Talk, a natural language interface for the product.
There is plenty of competition in the accounting space, particularly now that AI has shaken up the industry. Ali has his eyes focused on QuickBooks, which is still the biggest player — but he will also be facing well-funded startups like the Sequoia-backed Rillet, as well as the major labs’ own finance tools. It is a daunting task, but Ali thinks that Tabby can carve out a niche by focusing on the same small-to-medium-sized firms that helped his accounting business thrive.
“Everything we see is making us believe that there’s a path for other players, because the space is big,” Ali told TechCrunch. “There’s 30 million more businesses.”
Learn more about Tabby and the other innovative startups involved in our prestigious Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt, happening October 13-15 in downtown San Francisco.
What it means
For small business owners, this shift suggests a future where financial data is accessible without logging into a separate dashboard or hiring a specialist to maintain the books. The goal is to treat accounting as a utility, similar to electricity, rather than a distinct service requiring ongoing human intervention.
