At 24, Pryce Yebesi already has an exit: the sale of his crypto billing 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, OpenLedger, which brings automated accounting software to the products that enterprises and small businesses already use. It has already raised $3 million in a round led by Kindred Ventures.
Yebesi said he thought of OpenLedger while still working at Uptoia Labs, where he was chief product officer. He said he realized the businesses he worked with were still using outdated accounting software.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. This experience made me realize the need for more extensible and integrated accounting solutions,” Yebesi told TechCrunch. “Open Ledger is our answer to this challenge. An AI-driven, modular accounting tool that lives where our customers already work.”
After his company folded, he served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis. He worked with small businesses and saw that other founders had the same problems with accounting software. He teamed up with Ashytn Bell, who was working at a venture capital firm at the time, and started OpenLedger.
The company offers accounting features in the form of built-in components, APIs and a ledger database, which allows AI-driven categorization, reconciliation and financial reporting, Yebesi said. “OpenLedger aggregates and orchestrates any data source for companies, then allows AI to execute accounting functions with full financial context.”
There are already some old players in this space, like QuickBooks, or other startups like Layer and Teal. “What’s 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 data specifically to be used to allow transactional data databases to interact with LLMs without exposing consumer data to the underlying models. “With this, we are ready to minimize context limits, latency and security issues,” he said.
Yebesi called the fundraising smooth and said that OpenLedger met Kindred, its lead investor, because the firm invested in an earlier round in Yebesi’s previous company, Utopia. Other investors include Adventure Fund, Venture at Brex, Guy Friedman, CEO of SteadyMD, and Zach Abram, who just sold his company Bridge to Stripe for a cool billion.
OpenLedger has already signed several contracts, although Yebesi declined to disclose with whom. The company works with SaaS companies, fintechs and banks, which in turn work with small and medium-sized businesses, he said. The company is still in beta, though it plans to release it fully by the end of this month. The company will use the new capital to hire, and is looking for talent in manufacturing, engineering and business development.
“We’re doing a lot to hire great talent, train great financial role models in-house and investing heavily in early compliance,” Yebesi said.
Next, he says the company hopes to support at least one million end users by the end of this year. “Keep a weak team,” he said. “And help thousands of small businesses spend more time with their customers and less time closing their books.”
