A 24-year-old who exited his first company to Coinbase, raises $3M for his next venture

At 24, Price Yebesi has already had one exit: selling his crypto invoicing company Utopia Labs to Coinbase for an undisclosed amount.

Some founders don’t just have a company in them. On Monday, Yebesi announced the launch of his new company, OpenLedgerWhich embeds automated accounting software into already used products enterprises and small businesses. He has already raised $3 million under the leadership of Kindred Ventures.

Yebesi said he thought of OpenLedger while working at Aptoya Labs, where he was chief product officer. He said he realized that businesses he worked with were still using outdated accounting software

“When we built the invoicing product at Utopia, we saved our customers 70-80% of the time they spend on accounting work. That experience led me to realize the need for a more extensible and embedded accounting solution,” Yebesi told TechCrunch. “Open Ledger is our answer to that challenge. An AI-powered, modular accounting tool that lives where our customers already work.”

After leaving his company, he served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Washington University in St. Louis. He worked with small businesses and found that other founders had similar problems with accounting software. He teamed up with Ashton Bell, who was working at a venture capital firm at the time, and launched OpenLedger.

The company offers accounting features in the form of embeddable components, APIs and a ledger database, which allows for AI-powered categorization, reconciliation and financial reporting, Yebesi said. “OpenLedger aggregates and orchestrates every data source for companies, then allows AI to perform accounting functions with full financial context.”

There are already some legacy players in this space, like QuickBooks, or other startups like Layer and Teal “The specialty of our approach is that we have reimagined the data layer of financial transactions,” says Yebesi.

He said he and the team spent seven months developing data specifically to allow data transaction databases to interact with LLM without exposing customer data to base models. “With this, we’re going to minimize context limits, latency and security issues,” he said

Yebesi called the fundraising smooth and said OpenLedger met with its lead investor Kindred, as the firm invested in Yebesi’s previous company, Utopia, in a pre-seed round. Other investors include venture funds, Brakes Ventures, SteadyMD CEO Guy Friedman and Jack Abrams, who sold his company Bridge to Stripe for $1 billion.

OpenLedger has already signed some agreements, although Yebesi declined to disclose with whom. The company works with SaaS companies, fintechs and banks, which in turn work with small and medium-sized businesses, he said. The company is still in beta, though it plans to fully release later this month. The company will use the new capital to hire, and seek talent in product, engineering and business development.

“We’re investing heavily in hiring great talent, training great models for finance internally, and doing compliance,” Yebesi said.

Next, he said the company expects to support at least one million end users by the end of this year. “Have a lean team,” he said. “And helping thousands of small businesses spend more time with their customers and less time closing their books.”