Synthetic Raises $10M Seed Led by Khosla Ventures

We're building a bookkeeping service for software startups, run entirely by AI.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--We've raised $10 million in seed funding, led by Khosla Ventures. Basis Set Ventures also participated, alongside operator-investors Tobi Lütke (CEO, Shopify), Kaz Nejatian (CEO, Opendoor; former COO, Shopify), Zach Abrams (co-founder of Bridge, acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion), Cosmin Nicolaescu (CEO, Accrual; former CTO, Brex), and Michael Tannenbaum (CEO, Figure; former COO, Brex).

Synthetic is a bookkeeping service that employs no human bookkeepers or accountants. It connects to a customer's banks, payroll, billing systems, and inboxes, and comes back with sharp clarifying questions to make sure it understands the context of the business. The output is a clean set of accrual-basis books, ready to hand to a tax preparer.

Pricing will start at $49 per month; roughly a quarter of what a human-staffed service costs. Synthetic is available around the clock and doesn't take vacation, hit a backlog, or quit on its customers. Connect the accounts, answer the occasional clarifying question, and your books are done.

We have a deliberately narrow focus: only software, SaaS, and AI businesses. We want to build a highly tailored product that works incredibly well for a few businesses, rather than a broad one that serves no one particularly well. We'll be starting with the smallest customers, where the accounting is simplest, until the product is solid enough to start serving larger ones. Our team is currently iterating on a prototype with early design customers.

"I'm not sure if it's yet technologically possible to make this work," said Ian Crosby, founder and CEO of Synthetic. "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."

Our founder, Ian Crosby, previously co-founded Bench Accounting in 2012 and built it into the largest bookkeeping service for small businesses in North America, serving tens of thousands of customers. He started Synthetic with a direct, operational sense of what's actually hard about delivering bookkeeping at scale, and a conviction that the human-staffed model has a structural ceiling on price, speed, and availability that no amount of operational improvement will overcome.

“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,” said Jon Chu of Khosla Ventures. “What more can one really ask for here?”

Our aspiration goes beyond accounting. We want a founder to be able to press a button and watch a real, running company assemble itself around their idea: the website, incorporation, bank accounts, payments, accounting, and everything else. We want to make starting a software business as easy as starting a code repo. Accounting is our starting point.

We're headquartered in San Francisco, where we work in person six days a week. We're hiring engineers and sponsor visas for exceptional candidates worldwide — open roles at jobs.ashbyhq.com/synthetic.

About Synthetic: Synthetic is building autonomous AI bookkeeping for startups. Headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Khosla Ventures. More at synthetic.ai.