At 24 years old, Pryce Yebesi already has one exit: selling his crypto invoicing company Utopia Labs to Coinbase for an undisclosed amount.
Some founders don’t just have one company in them. On Monday, Yebesi announced the launch of his new company, Open Ledger, which embeds automated accounting software into products that enterprises and small businesses already use. He has already raised $3 million in a round led by Kindred Ventures and Blank Ventures.
Yebesi said he thought of Open Ledger while still working at Utopia Labs, where he was the chief product officer. He said he realized that the businesses he worked with were still using outdated accounting software.
“When we built invoicing products at Utopia, we saved our customers 70-80% of the time they spent on accounting tasks. That experience led me to realize the need for more extensible and embedded accounting solutions,” Yebesi told TechCrunch. “Open Ledger is our answer to that challenge. An AI-driven, modular accounting tool that lives where our customers already work.”
After his company exited, he served as an entrepreneur-in-resident at Washington University in St. Louis. He worked with small businesses and saw that other founders had the same issues with accounting software. He teamed up with Ashtyn Bell — who was working in AI research at a venture capital firm at the time and previously led product at Candy Digital — to launch Open Ledger.
The company offers accounting features in the form of embeddable components, APIs, and a ledger database, which allows AI-driven categorization, reconciliation, and financial reporting, Yebesi said. “Open Ledger aggregates and orchestrates every data source for companies, then allows AI to execute accounting functions with full financial context.”
There are already some legacy players in this space, like QuickBooks, or other startups like Layer and Teal. “What is special about our approach is that we reimagined the data layer of financial transactions,” Yebesi said.
He said he and the team spent seven months developing AI workflows specifically to be used in allowing data transaction databases to interact with LLMs without exposing consumer data to base models. “With this, we’re about to minimize context limits, latency, and security issues,” he said.
Yebesi called fundraising smooth, and said Open Ledger met Kindred, its lead investor, because the firm invested in the pre-seed round at Yebesi’s previous company, Utopia. Other investors include Adventure Fund, Jonathan Chang from Brex, Guy Friedman, the CEO of SteadyMD, and Zach Abrams, who just sold his company Bridge to Stripe for a cool billion.
Open Ledger has already signed some contracts, though Yebesi declined to disclose with whom. The company works with SaaS companies, fintech, and banks, that in turn work with small- and medium-sized businesses, he said. The company is still in beta, though it plans to fully release by the end of this month. The company will use the fresh capital to hire, and is looking for talent in product, engineering, and business development.
“We’re putting a lot towards hiring great talent, training great models for financial work internally, and investing a lot in compliance early,” Yebesi said.
Next, he says the company hopes to support at least a million end users by the end of this year. “Keep a lean team,” he said. “And help thousands of small businesses spend more time with their customers and less time closing their books.”
Correction: This story was updated to reflect the spelling of Open Ledger, Ashtyn Bell‘s previous working experience, and add Blank Ventures as an investor.
