Khosla Ventures is betting $10M on Ian Crosby, whose last startup, Bench, imploded

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.