Tabby: Ex-Accountant Uses AI to Make Bookkeeping Obsolete

In May 2025, Ahad Ali was a successful accountant overseeing a team of 20 people and handling more than 2,000 tax returns a year. Although his business was stable, he began noticing how his daily tasks were increasingly dictated by the frictions of legacy accounting software that was rarely built with actual accountants in mind. His growing frustration with programs like QuickBooks eventually expanded into dissatisfaction with the entire SaaS-based accounting model.

Ali told TechCrunch that small businesses do not need better accounting software, but rather less accounting software that simply handles the work for them. To solve this, he developed Tabby, a real-time bookkeeping interface that processes client paperwork while providing up-to-the-minute data on business profit and loss.

Tabby utilizes Plaid to import live account accounts and leverages artificial intelligence to rapidly build real-time financial dashboards. While there is a version tailored for accounting firms seeking an alternative to QuickBooks, Ali's primary goal is going directly to end users, turning bookkeeping into a monthly service charge comparable to internet access or payroll.

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

"You can say Quickbooks digitized bookkeeping, but we want to make that visible software layer nonexistent."

Ahad Ali

Fourteen months in, Tabby has attracted 5,500 small businesses to the platform, generating roughly $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. The startup operates with a lean team of seven—including Ali, his technical co-founder, four engineers, and a go-to-market specialist—while currently raising $1 million in pre-seed funding. During interviews, Ali's team was preparing to launch Tabby Talk, a natural language interface for the product.