In Tabby, a former accountant uses AI to make accountants obsolete.

In May 2025, Ahad Ali was a successful accountant, overseeing a team of 20 people and processing over 2,000 returns a year. “We did all the bookkeeping, accounting, sales and taxes,” Ali says. It was a stable business and easy to sustain.

However, Ali began to realize something. His job became increasingly dependent on the friction of accounting software that was rarely designed with actual accountants in mind. He became dissatisfied with certain accounting software, such as QuickBooks, and soon became dissatisfied with the whole idea of ​​SaaS-based accounting.

“We realized that small businesses don’t need better accounting software,” Ali told TechCrunch. “They’re reducing their need for accounting software. They need something that does that for them.”

Now, Ali is building just that. His product, Tabby, is designed as a real-time bookkeeping interface that handles client paperwork while providing up-to-date data on the profit and loss of a client’s business. Tabby uses Plaid to import live account data and use AI to quickly build real-time dashboards to understand a company’s financial health.

There is also a Tabby version for accounting firms looking for a smarter alternative to Quickbooks, but Ali’s goal is to offer it directly to end users as often as possible. The way Ali sees it, products like Tabby have the opportunity to completely automate the task of bookkeeping and turn it into a monthly fee for internet access and payroll services. If successful, it could significantly change the business calculations of small and medium-sized enterprises.

“You could say Quickbooks digitized bookkeeping,” Ali told TechCrunch. “But we want to make sure that (the visible software layer) doesn’t exist.”

So far, it seems to be working well. Fourteen months later, Tabby has 5,500 small businesses using the platform and approximately $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The team is still just seven people (Ali, a 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 with Ali, his team was just preparing to launch the product’s natural language interface, Tabby Talk.

There is a lot of competition in the accounting field, especially now that AI has transformed ___. While Ali remains focused on the biggest player, Quickbooks, he will also face well-funded startups like Sequoia-backed Rillet, as well as the proprietary financial tools of major research labs. It’s a daunting task, but Ali believes he can carve out a niche by focusing on the same small businesses that helped Tabby’s accounting business thrive.

“Everything we see makes other players believe there’s a way, because there’s more space,” Ali told TechCrunch. “There are 30 million more businesses.”

Learn more about Tabby and other innovative startups participating in TechCrunch Disrupt’s prestigious Battlefield competition from October 13th to 15th in downtown San Francisco.