In mid-May, a bookkeeping startup called Synthetic raised $10 million in a seed round led by Khosla Ventures. The product employs no human bookkeepers. It is built to connect to a company’s banks, payroll, billing systems, and inbox, ask clarifying questions when it needs context, and keep the books on its own. Pricing is set to start at $49 a month, roughly a quarter of what a staffed service charges. It is not shipping yet, though. Crosby’s small team has worked on it for about a year, the system is still in what he calls a crash-test phase, and he is blunt about the odds: “I don’t know if this is possible yet,” he told BetaKit.

The founder is Ian Crosby, and the name carries weight in this profession. Crosby co-founded Bench, the venture-backed company that paired bookkeeping software with real human bookkeepers, and ran it as CEO for about eleven years until the board pushed him out in early 2022. He went on to lead financial services at Shopify, then co-founded a second accounting startup, Teal, which Mercury acquired in 2024. Bench, meanwhile, shut down abruptly two days after Christmas in 2024, telling small-business customers to pull their data within days and find someone new. Employer.com bought the remains and later put the number of stranded active customers near 12,000. Bench had raised around $113 million over its life.

So the person who spent more than a decade building the largest human-plus-software bookkeeping service in North America, then watched it collapse from the outside, has raised money to rebuild that model with the humans taken out. That is either the sharpest read in the category or an expensive way to relearn an old lesson. We do not know yet, and neither does anyone else.

Here is why it matters beyond one funding round. Synthetic is the cleanest version of a bet the whole market is placing this year. In our first edition, we covered Botkeeper, which raised about $90 million, ran for eleven years on a bots-plus-offshore-humans model, and shut down in February. Two of the most visible human-plus-software bookkeeping companies have now failed inside fourteen months. Capital’s response has not been to add more human oversight. It has been to take the humans out.

The incumbents are moving the same way, more cautiously. In May, Xero switched on a live connector into Claude and previewed XeroForce, a no-code tool that lets a business build its own AI agents on top of its Xero data. Intuit’s partnership with Anthropic, announced in February, is rolling out this spring and lets mid-market businesses build custom agents on its platform. Basis, which sells agents to accounting firms rather than to their clients, raised $100 million at a $1.15 billion valuation. The money agrees on the destination and is racing there.

We think the autonomous bet is more defensible than the Botkeeper post-mortem alone would suggest, for one specific reason. What sank Bench and Botkeeper was not the software. It was the cost and management drag of the human-services layer wrapped around it. Take that layer out and the unit economics change completely. The AI is also genuinely better than it was two years ago. That part is real.

But the lesson from both collapses, and from the tools we tested in our first edition, is the one the vendors keep paying to relearn. Someone still has to catch what the model gets wrong, and someone still has to answer for the numbers when they go to a lender, an investor, or the IRS. A no-human service does not remove that job. It moves it onto you.

So the question for a controller or a firm owner is not whether AI can keep the books. Increasingly it can. The questions are narrower and more boring. Who reviews and signs the numbers before they leave the building. What happens when an agent miscodes something with full confidence and nobody flags it. And the one Bench’s customers learned two days after Christmas: how fast can you get all of your data out if the vendor disappears. Get those three answers in writing before you hand any no-human service your books.

— Footnote

Footnote is an independent publication. It is not professional accounting, tax, or legal advice. Our analysis and opinions are based on the company announcements, funding disclosures, and reporting linked above. Product details and prices are current as of June 2026 and subject to change. We have no consulting relationships with any vendor named in this article.