A company launched out of Vancouver last year with an idea to help smaller businesses build accounting products for their customers.
With Teal, users can build a financial hub that drives attachment and engagement across all financial services products, according to the founders. And they can do it in a matter of weeks, not months.
The founders of the fintech—Ian Crosby, chief executive officer, and Adam Saint, head of design—have some experience in the space.
Indeed, Teal is not the first fintech the pair have been involved with. Many will have heard of Bench Accounting, which Crosby and Saint cofounded back in 2011 (Saint left Bench in 2016 and Crosby departed his role as CEO in 2022).
Crosby also has experience at Ottawa’s Shopify, an investor in Bench.
And speaking of investment—this month, Teal confirmed US$8 million in seed funding, according to a report from BetaKit.
The seed round was led by Torch Capital, BK reports, and saw support from Basis Set Ventures, General Advance, and the Dash Fund, as well as undisclosed angel investors.
“I feel like I left the job half-done with Bench,” Crosby told BK, suggesting that the vision for Teal is an evolved form of what he and Saint built the first time.
With Teal, Crosby and Saint are aiming to develop a “Stripe for accounting” by offering infrastructure to vertical software-based companies so that they can provide accounting features within their own platforms.
Why this approach specifically? Through his combined experience at Bench at Shopify, Crosby believes he “saw what was missing” in the industry.
“I just had this ‘aha’ moment of: ‘Oh my God, accounting needs to live inside vertical [software-as-a-service],'” Crosby recalled for BK.
With seed capital lining now its pocket, Vancouver fintech Teal is looking to push into the market and scale up.
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