A 24-year-old exited his first company to Coinbase, raising $3 million for his next venture

At 24 years old, Bryce Yebisi already has one way out: selling his cryptocurrency billing company Utopia Labs to Coinbase for an undisclosed sum.

Some founders don’t have just one company. On Monday, Yebisi announced the launch of his new company, Open the ledgerwhich integrates automated accounting software into products that enterprises and small businesses are already using. It has already raised $3 million in a round led by Kindred Ventures and Blank Ventures.

Yebisi said he thought about Open Ledger while he was still working at Utopia Labs, where he was chief product officer. He said he realized that the companies he worked with were still using outdated accounting software.

“When we built Utopia’s invoicing products, we saved our customers 70-80% of the time they spent on accounting tasks. “This experience led me to realize the need for more integrated and extensible accounting solutions,” Yebisi told TechCrunch. “Open Ledger is Our answer to this challenge. A standardized, AI-driven accounting tool that exists where our clients already work.

After his company exited, he served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s worked with small businesses and seen that other founders had the same issues with accounting software. He teamed up with Ashtyn Bell — who was working in AI research at a venture capital firm at the time and had previously led product at Candy Digital — to launch Open Ledger.

The company offers accounting features in the form of embeddable components, APIs and a ledger database, allowing for AI-based classification, reconciliation and financial reporting, Yebisi said. “Open Ledger aggregates and formats every data source for businesses, then allows AI to perform accounting functions in an entire financial context.”

There are already some old players in this space, like QuickBooks, or other startups like Layer and Teal. “What is unique about our approach is that we have reimagined the data layer of financial transactions,” Yebisi said.

He said he and his team spent seven months developing AI workflows specifically for use in allowing data transaction databases to interact with LLMs without exposing consumer data to underlying models. “With this, we are on the verge of reducing context limits, latency and security issues,” he said.

Yebesi described the fundraising as smooth, and said Open Ledger met Kindred, its lead investor, because the company had invested in a pre-seed round in 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 already signed some contracts, though Yebesi declined to reveal with whom. He said the company works with SaaS, fintech and banks, which in turn work with small and medium enterprises. 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 for recruiting, looking for talent in product, engineering and business development.

“We put a lot of effort into hiring great talent, training great financial role models internally, and investing a lot in compliance early on,” Yebisi said.

After that, he says the company hopes to support at least 1 million end users by the end of this year. “Keep a weak team,” he said. “Helping 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 work experience and add Blank Ventures as an investor.