Acctual has raised $3.85 million in seed funding at a $15 million post-money valuation to help crypto startups manage their money, the company’s co-founder and CEO Atikh Bana exclusively told TechCrunch.
“At a high level Acctual is just a better way to manage invoices and bills in crypto,” Bana said. “It’s like a true accounts payable automation process for digital assets.”
The round was co-led by Third Prime and IDEO and included investors like Alchemy Ventures, OrangeDAO, Soma Capital, Messari’s founder Ryan Selkis, Nium founder Prajit Nanu and others. The capital will be used to help the company find product-market fit and scale its business and team, it said.
Acctual was co-founded by Bana, Issa Hassan and Mohamedeq Mohamed. Bana and Mohamed have backgrounds in product development from their time at Stripe, while Hassan previously worked as a software engineer at Google. “One of the earliest ideas that we thought about was how we can become the future of payments for B2B,” Bana said.
Most accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) automation processes are geared toward businesses that are in the traditional financial world, as opposed to the crypto space, Bana said. “We wanted to build something in web3 and address the problems and fragmentation — and really there’s an opportunity to help bring standards and processes to financial operations in web3.”
While there are a number of web3 finance-focused startups in the market like Bitwave or Cryptio, Acctual intends to differentiate itself by focusing on “breadth versus depth,” Bana said. “When you try to be an accounting product that’s also [an accounts] payable and receivable product you’re stretching yourself way too thin. So we really want to be diligent about building a proper tool that hits on the pain points there.”
The founders created an automation process for AR and AP of fiat and digital assets to “ensure things are paid on time, you’re not over-paying things or paying with the wrong wallet, or not paying malicious invoices, things like that,” Bana said.
The financial operating system is in its beta phase and is being tested globally by “native web3 organizations” ranging from Series A startups to companies that just need a proper financial operations system.
Some of its features focus on reducing fraud and spam by paying the correct vendor or crypto wallet address, monitoring and approving invoices, and syncing crypto invoices and payments to QuickBooks or Xero.
Acctual’s long-term goal is to “be able to better route payments,” and consider “what does it look like to build a network of exchanges around the world to help with the first and last miles for crypto transactions where you can offramp,” Bana said. “Some of the different nuances that make digital assets feel like fiat — that’s the big idea here is to make it feel like what is being done today but faster and better.”