A 24-year-old who quit his first company to Coinbase raised $3 million for his next venture

At 24, Pryce Yebesi already had an exit plan: selling his cryptocurrency invoicing company, Utopia Labs, to Coinbase for an undisclosed amount.

Some founders don’t own just one company. On Monday, Yebesi announced the launch of his new company, Open Ledger, which embeds automated accounting software into products already used by enterprises and small businesses. He has raised $3 million in a funding round led by Kindred Ventures and Blank Ventures.

Yebesi said he got the idea for Open Ledger while working at Utopia Labs, where he was chief product officer. He said he realized the businesses he was working with were still using outdated accounting software.

“When we built the invoicing product at Utopia, we saved clients 70-80% of time on accounting tasks. That experience made me realize the need for more scalable and embedded accounting solutions,” Yebesi told TechCrunch. “Open Ledger is our answer to this challenge. An AI-powered modular accounting tool that lives where our customers work.”

After the company exited, he served as Entrepreneur in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis. He worked with small businesses and discovered that other founders had the same problem with accounting software. He launched Open Ledger in partnership with Ashtyn Bell, who was working on artificial intelligence at a venture capital firm and previously led product at Candy Digital.

Yebesi said the company provides accounting capabilities in the form of embeddable components, APIs and ledger databases that allow for AI-driven classification, reconciliation and financial reporting. “Open Ledger aggregates and orchestrates every data source in a company, then allows artificial intelligence to perform accounting functions within the full financial context.”

There are already some traditional players in this space, such as QuickBooks, or other startups such as Layer and Teal. “What’s special about our approach is that we reimagine the data layer of financial transactions,” Yebesi said.

He said he and his team spent seven months developing an AI workflow specifically designed to allow data transaction databases to interact with the LLM without exposing consumer data to the underlying model. “Through this, we will minimize context constraints, latency and security issues,” he said.

Yebesi called the financing smooth and said Open Ledger met with its lead investor Kindred as the company invested in the pre-seed round of Yebesi's previous company, Utopia. Other investors include Adventure Fund, Brex's Jonathan Chang, SteadyMD CEO Guy Friedman and Zach Abrams, who just sold his company Bridge to Stripe for $1 billion.

Open Ledger has signed some contracts, but Yebesi declined to say with whom. He said the company works with SaaS companies, fintechs and banks, which in turn work with small and medium-sized enterprises. The company is still in beta but plans a full launch by the end of this month. The company will use the new funding to recruit and is looking for talent in product, engineering and business development.

“We invest heavily in recruiting great talent, training great financial working models internally and investing heavily in compliance early on,” Yebesi said.

Next, he said the company hopes to support at least one million end users by the end of the year. “Keep a lean team,” he said. “And help thousands of small businesses spend more time with customers and less time at checkout.”

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