The 24-year-old, who exited his first company Coinbase, raised $3 million for his next venture

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, Open Ledgerwhich integrates automated accounting software into products already used by businesses and small businesses. It has already raised $3 million in a round led by Kindred Ventures and Blank Ventures.

Yebesi said he thought of Open Ledger while working at Utopia 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 He said he realized the businesses he worked with were still using outdated accounting software.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 Ashtyn Bell, who at the time worked in AI research at a venture capital firm and previously led product at Candy Digital, to launch Open Ledger.

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. “Open Ledger unifies 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 said he and the team spent seven months developing AI workflows that would be used specifically to allow data operations databases to interact with LLMs without exposing consumer data to underlying models. “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 Open Ledger’s lead investor, Kindred, because the firm had invested in Yebesi’s previous company, Utopia, in a pre-seed round. Other investors include Adventure Fund, Brex’s Jonathan Chang, SteadyMD CEO Guy Friedman, and Zach Abrams, who sold Bridge to Stripe for a cool billion.

Open Ledger has already signed some deals, 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.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the spelling of Open Ledger, Ashtyn Bell‘previous business experience and add Blank Ventures as an investor.