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At 24, Pryce Yebesi already has an exit: selling crypto-invoicing company Utopia Labs to Coinbase for an undisclosed sum.
Some founders don’t have just one company. On Monday, Yebesi announced the opening of his new company, OpenLedgerIntegrating automated accounting software into products already used by enterprises and small businesses. It has already raised $3 million in a round led by Kindred Ventures.
Yebesi said he thought of OpenLedger while working at Uptoia Labs, where he is still 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 He said he realized the businesses he worked with were still using outdated accounting software.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 spend on accounting tasks. This experience made me realize the need for more scalable and embedded accounting solutions,” Yebesi told TechCrunch. “Open Accounting Book is our answer to this problem. An AI-powered modular accounting tool that lives where our customers already work.”
After his company was spun off, he served as entrepreneur-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis. He worked with small businesses and noticed that other founders had the same problems with their accounting software. He teamed up with Ashytn Bell, then working at a venture capital firm, to launch OpenLedger.
Yebesi said the company offers accounting features in the form of add-on components, APIs and ledger databases that enable AI-based classification, reconciliation and financial reporting. “OpenLedger integrates and organizes every data source for companies, then enables AI to perform accounting functions in a complete financial context.”
There are already old players in this space like QuickBooks or other startups like Layer and Teal. “What’s special about our approach is that we’ve reimagined the data layer of financial transactions,” Yebesi said.
He and his team spent seven months specifically developing data to allow data operations databases to interact with LLMs without exposing consumer data to base models, he said. “With this, we’re going to minimize context constraints, latency, and security issues,” he said.
Yebesi called the fundraising seamless and said he met with OpenLedger’s lead investor, Kindred, because the firm had invested in a pre-seed 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 Bridge to Stripe for a cool billion.
OpenLedger has already signed some contracts, though Yebesi declined to say who. According to him, the company works with SaaS companies, fintech and banks, which in turn work with small and medium businesses. 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 seeking talent in product, engineering and business development.
“We’re putting a lot of effort into hiring great talent, building great models for internal finance, and investing heavily in early adoption,” Yebesi said.
He then said the company hopes to support at least one 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.”
