In May of 2025, Ahad Ali was a successful accountant, overseeing a team of 20 people and handling more than 2,000 returns a year. “We did bookkeeping, accounting, sales tax, taxes, everything,” Ali says. It was a stable business, and one that would have been easy to stay in.

But Ali started to notice something. His work was increasingly dictated by the frictions of accounting software, which was rarely designed with actual accountants in mind. He became frustrated with specific accounting software like QuickBooks, and soon he became 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 to be a real-time bookkeeping interface, handling clients’ paperwork as it gives 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’s 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 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’s plenty of competition in the accounting space, particularly now that AI has shaken things up. Ali has his eyes focused on QuickBooks, which is still the biggest player — but he’ll also be facing well-funded startups like the Sequoia-backed Rillet, as well as the major labs’ own finance tools. It’s 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 Startup Battlefield 200 competition at TechCrunch Disrupt, happening October 13-15 in downtown San Francisco.