From Running 2,000 Returns a Year to Building the Software That Replaces Them
In May 2025, Ahad Ali was a successful accountant overseeing a team of 20 and handling more than 2,000 returns a year. "We did bookkeeping, accounting, sales tax, taxes, everything," Ali says. It was a stable business β one that would have been easy to stay in.
But Ali started noticing something. His work was increasingly dictated by the frictions of accounting software that was rarely designed with actual accountants in mind. He grew frustrated with specific tools like QuickBooks, and soon with the entire premise 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."
Tabby: A Real-Time Bookkeeping Layer That Aims to Disappear
Now Ali is building exactly that. His product, Tabby, is designed as a real-time bookkeeping interface that 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 applies AI to quickly build a real-time dashboard of a business's financial health.
There is also a version of Tabby for accounting firms seeking a smarter alternative to QuickBooks, but Ali's goal is to go direct to the end user as often as possible. As he sees it, products like Tabby have a chance to automate bookkeeping work once and for all, turning it into a modest monthly charge on the order of internet access or payroll services. If successful, that shift 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."
Traction: 5,500 Businesses, $100K ARR, and a Seven-Person Team
So far, it seems to be working. Fourteen months in, Tabby has 5,500 small businesses on the platform, with roughly $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The team is still just seven people β Ali, his technical co-founder, four engineers, and a go-to-market specialist β and is in the process of raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. When I spoke with Ali, his team was preparing to launch Tabby Talk, a natural language interface for the product.
A Crowded, Newly Reordered Market
Competition in the accounting space is intense, particularly now that AI has reshuffled the stacks that finance teams rely on. Ali has his eyes on QuickBooks, still the biggest player, but he will also face well-funded startups like the Sequoia-backed Rillet, as well as the major labs' own finance tools. It is a daunting task, but Ali believes 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 13β15 in downtown San Francisco.
via TechCrunch AI