Ian Crosby, the founder who was ousted from bookkeeping startup Bench Accounting before it collapsed in 2024, has raised $10 million in seed funding for a new venture. His new startup, Synthetic, is building a fully autonomous AI bookkeeping service targeting other startups. The round, announced in 2026, was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Basis Set Ventures and Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke.
Synthetic aims to generate accrual-based financial statements without any direct human involvement — a departure from how most accounting platforms, such as Xero, currently operate. The product is still in the design phase, and Crosby himself acknowledges the vision may not yet be technically achievable with current AI models. For now, a prototype works for a narrow set of users, but Crosby is uncertain how it will scale. “It’s like a self-driving car that can drive down one street versus the self-driving car that can drive down any street,” he told TechCrunch.
Crosby’s path to this new startup has been complicated. He says Bench’s board fired him in 2021, three months after he declined a $250 million acquisition offer from Brex. The company subsequently struggled under new management and shut down in 2024 before being acquired for a reduced price. After leaving Bench, Crosby joined Shopify and founded Teal, an accounting startup that Mercury acquired 18 months later.
Khosla partner Jon Chu said he spoke with executives who worked with Crosby after his Bench departure and received positive accounts. Chu drew a parallel to Parker Conrad, who was pushed out of Zenefits in 2016 and later founded Rippling, now valued at nearly $17 billion. “I believe people have room for growth,” Chu said.
Crosby says the funding gives him time to wait for AI models to become more reliable. “I’ve raised years of cash, so we can just wait it out,” he said. Synthetic plans to serve only AI and software startups, and Crosby has set a firm product standard: “We’re not going to release anything that’s not fully autonomous. It’s that or bust.”
Source: TechCrunch