Ian Crosby, whose previous startup Bench Accounting famously shut down in 2024 before being bought for scraps , is taking another shot at building a business out of automating the arduous work of bookkeeping.

His new startup, Synthetic , aims to build a fully autonomous AI bookkeeper that can generate accrual-based financials without direct human involvement. Although the product is still in the design phase — and Crosby admits his vision may not yet be technologically possible — the startup has raised $10 million in a Seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Basis Set Ventures and Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke.

Most investors would run from a founder facing the kind of challenges Crosby is right now — the fallout of his previous business collapsing, and a vision that may exceed the technical feasibility of current foundational models.…