Teal Announces $8M Seed Investment to Drive Next-Gen Accounting Products for Vertical SaaS

Teal, a rapidly growing startup specializing in accounting infrastructure for Vertical SaaS businesses, has announced $8 USD million in seed funding. Founded in 2023 by Ian Crosby, former Head of Financial Services at Shopify and CEO and co-founder of Bench Accounting, Teal allows Vertical SaaS businesses to build their own accounting suites to offer to their SMB customers. The round was led by Torch Capital with participation from Basis Set Ventures, General Advance, Dash Fund, and angel investors including executives at Service Titan, Plaid, Brex, Unit, and Gusto.

Teal equips companies with the APIs and tools to build their own accounting offerings for small business customers, allowing the end-customer SMBs to draw critical insights like real-time cash flow and per product profitability, as well as file their taxes and get support from live bookkeepers.

“Teal is building the Stripe for accounting. Just like Stripe provides the underlying infrastructure for Vertical SaaS companies to build payments products, Teal provides the infrastructure for Vertical SaaS companies to build and offer accounting features within their platforms,” said Ian Crosby, Co-Founder and CEO of Teal. “Having led Bench Accounting, the largest bookkeeping service for SMBs for a decade, I saw firsthand the limitations of standalone accounting software that is not integrated into the rest of a business’ core platform. We built Teal to address this problem.”

The need for embedded finance for Vertical SaaS is growing exponentially, but the number one demanded feature that has not yet been incorporated is accounting. The absence of an accounting solution is the top reason for lack of adoption of financial services features. By offering software directly within their platforms, Teal’s customers create a financial hub that enhances engagement with the rest of their financial service products such as payments, invoices, and banking.

“We’re thrilled to be supporting Teal in its mission to revolutionize the accounting space for SMBs. There are 30M+ SMBs in the US, and at Torch, we invest behind the tools and platforms that help their businesses thrive. There’s a huge, dire need for streamlined and intuitive accounting tools, and Teal’s embedded approach, coupled with Ian and team’s proven track record of building standout financial software will address these long standing pain points. Teal’s rapid growth and early success are a testament to this,” says Katie Reiner, Partner at Torch Capital.

Teal offers a suite of out-of-the box tools to allow Vertical SaaS companies to launch their accounting platforms in as little as four weeks, including fully functioning app code repositories and native data integrations with external data sources such as Plaid.