Gen Z founder Pryce Yebesi has secured $3M for his recently launched startup, Open Ledger, which aims to modernize accounting for businesses with AI-driven solutions.
The funding round was led by Kindred Ventures with participation from Adventure Fund, Jonathan Chang from Brex, Guy Friedman, the CEO of SteadyMD, and Zach Abrams, who just sold his company Bridge to Stripe.
The company will use the new capital to hire talent in product, engineering, and business development.
Ideating Open Ledger
Pryce Yebesi, 24, already made waves in the tech world by selling his crypto invoicing company, Utopia Labs, to Coinbase. The idea for Open Ledger came to him while he was still working on Utopia Labs. He realized that the businesses he worked with were using outdated accounting softwares.
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“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 the company exited, he served as an entrepreneur-in-resident at Washington University in St. Louis. While working with small businesses, he saw that other founders had the same issues with accounting software.
That was when he teamed up with Ashtyn Bell — who was working at a venture capital firm at the time and previously led product at Candy Digital — to launch Open Ledger.
Open Ledger 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.”
Although there are legacy players in this space, like QuickBooks and other startups like Layer and Teal, Yebesi claims Open Ledger is special because they reimagined the data layer of financial transactions.
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He said he and the team spent seven months developing data 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.
Next Plans For Open Ledger
Open Ledger has already signed some contracts with some undisclosed entities. The company currently works as a B2B with SaaS companies, fintech, and banks, which, in turn, work with small- and medium-sized businesses.
Although, the company is still in beta, it plans to fully release by the end of this month. The fresh capital will be used 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.
Looking forward, Open Ledger 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.”
