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Synthetic

Also known as: Synthetic, Inc., Synthetic AI, synthetic.ai

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Entry priceWaitlist only; no published pricingFull pricing detail

Waitlist-stage autonomous AI bookkeeping service for software startups from Bench co-founder Ian Crosby: connect banks, payroll and email, the agent reconciles and produces accrual-basis books with clarifying questions as the only human touchpoint, no human bookkeepers, and outputs posted without vendor review per its own privacy policy.

Synthetic, Inc. is a San Francisco company building an autonomous AI bookkeeping service for software, SaaS and AI startups, founded by Ian Crosby, who previously co-founded Bench Accounting and built it into the largest small-business bookkeeping service in North America, and backed by a $10 million seed led by Khosla Ventures with Basis Set Ventures and operator angels including Tobi Lutke.

The product is an AI agent that does bookkeeping start to finish: connect bank accounts, payroll, business tools and email, and the agent reads the context of the business, reconciles what needs reconciling, and comes back with sharp clarifying questions rather than busywork, producing accrual-basis books ready to hand to a tax preparer, with full access to financials and the insights behind them and export wherever needed.

Its privacy policy describes the agentic systems operating autonomously, categorizing, posting and reconciling transactions, generating journal entries, initiating workflows and requesting documentation without routine human review, with the Google Workspace integration reading Gmail content for categorization under Google's Limited Use policy and processing it generally in memory, and with hosting on servers in the United States.

The company employs no human bookkeepers, states that its personnel do not review or verify AI outputs, and holds a stated release standard of exceeding human-bookkeeper reliability before broad availability; access today is by waitlist, with design partners running the product on real books, and the seed release announced pricing that will begin at $49 a month. The longer ambition, framed on the site as aspiration, is to make starting a business as easy as starting a repo, with an embeddable service and automated incorporation, banking and payments beyond bookkeeping.

Vendor details

Canonical URL

https://synthetic.ai

Category

Enterprise operations agent

Subcategory

Agentic AI bookkeeping for startups

Funding status

Independent, based in San Francisco, founded in 2025 by chief executive Ian Crosby, who co-founded Bench Accounting in 2012 and built it into one of the largest small business bookkeeping services in North America, and later founded Teal, which Mercury acquired. Synthetic raised a ten million dollar seed round in May 2026 led by Khosla Ventures, with Basis Set Ventures and operator investors including Tobi Lütke of Shopify, Kaz Nejatian of Opendoor, Zach Abrams of Bridge, Cosmin Nicolaescu of Accrual, and Michael Tannenbaum of Figure. The roughly five person team builds in person in San Francisco, and the product is early, with the company stating it will not launch broadly until it is more reliable than a human bookkeeper.

Company status

independent

Use cases & customers

Primary use cases

automated bookkeepingfinancial reconciliationaccrual basis accountingstartup back office

Target customers

early stage startupsSaaS and software companiesAI companies

Deployment options

SaaScloud

Integrations

Synthetic connects bank accounts, payroll, business tools and email by type, and its privacy policy documents the Google Workspace and Gmail integration in detail, reading message content for transaction categorization and reconciliation, alongside bank and card feeds and accounting system data. No connector catalog is published, and the books leave by export rather than write-back. Its longer term vision is an embeddable, Stripe like API for bookkeeping.

In practice

As an early founder you lose hours posting transactions and reconciling accounts, or pay a bookkeeping service more than a young startup can justify. Synthetic connects your banks, payroll, and billing once and produces accrual basis books for about a quarter of the cost.

Bookkeeping is batched and manual, so your books lag weeks behind and you never have a current picture. Synthetic reconciles continuously and comes back with sharp clarifying questions only when it genuinely needs context about a transaction.

You want books that are clean and audit ready to hand to a tax preparer without managing accounting software yourself. Synthetic is built compliance first with tax rules and audit trails and takes full responsibility for accuracy rather than acting as an assistant.

Agentic Index coverage score

3.0 / 14 capabilities · 21%

Integrations & Tool Calling Partial

Connection is documented by type with one named route: the homepage connects bank accounts, payroll system, business tools and email, and the legal tier documents the Google Workspace and Gmail integration in API-level detail, reading message content for transaction categorization and reconciliation under Google's Limited Use policy, plus bank and card feeds and accounting system data among connected Financial Information. Google Workspace is the only integration named on a vendor surface, no connector catalog exists, and the work products flow out by export rather than write-back.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Workflow Orchestration Partial

One fixed loop run by the vendor's agent: connect everything, Synthetic reads the business context, reconciles, asks clarifying questions and produces accrual-basis books, with the legal tier adding that the agentic systems initiate workflows and provide workflow and task management. The customer composes nothing; there is no builder, no runtime and no configurable sequence.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Knowledge Grounding & RAG Partial

Grounding is described only at a high level. Synthetic goes in and reads the context of the business from connected banks, payroll, business tools and email, the legal tier adds chart of accounts, corporate ownership structure and related documentation among connected data with Gmail content read for categorization, and the accrual books it maintains are cumulative, each period building on the last. No query surface, corpus description or retrieval mechanism is published.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Human Oversight & Guardrails Partial

The clarifying-questions channel is the one documented human mechanism, and the legal tier draws the rest of the line explicitly: the homepage has Synthetic coming back with sharp clarifying questions on ambiguous context, agent-initiated consultation before proceeding, while the privacy policy's Agentic AI section states the systems categorize, post and reconcile autonomously without routine human review by Synthetic, that personnel do not independently audit, review or verify the correctness of outputs, and that the customer is responsible for deciding whether to rely on outputs at their own risk.

The agent consults on uncertainty but there is no approval gate on posting; the customer only decides afterwards whether to rely on outputs. A rights clause offers human review where law requires it, as a legal right rather than a feature of the product.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Security, Identity & Governance Not documented

Nothing on the site or in the legal tier documents an attestation or access controls: no certification or attestation of any kind, no SSO, no roles or permission model, and the privacy policy's security section offers only commercially reasonable safeguards boilerplate with an express disclaimer that security cannot be guaranteed. The company is waitlist-stage, with a registered office at an apartment address. No security program for general availability is published.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Observability & Auditability Partial

Output visibility, with no record of what the agent did. The homepage gives full access to financials and the insights behind them, and the legal tier has the Services preparing management reports and dashboards and generating derived artifacts, categorizations, reconciliations, anomaly flags and suggested entries. No log of agent actions, no trace of what was posted and why, and no customer-openable run record is documented, and the privacy policy states Synthetic personnel do not review outputs, so there is no vendor-side QA record either.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Memory & State Persistence Not documented

No memory layer is documented anywhere. The ongoing reconciled ledger is the application's own accounting data; the legal tier's Gmail section states message content is generally processed in memory without storage beyond the feature, retained only case by case; remembering preferences in the policy is cookie language; and the one learning clause, improving models that serve only the specific user whose data is processed, is learning absorbed per user rather than agent memory.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Deployment & Data Residency Not documented

One stated hosting country and nothing to choose. The privacy policy says visitors and customers connect through and to servers located in the United States, with information maintained on web servers and systems within the United States, and international transfers framed as consent to US processing. There is no region list, no customer environment and no selection surface.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Not documented

One single-purpose bookkeeping agent for one vertical, software startups, with no library, catalog, template or second adoptable unit documented anywhere.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.airead 2026-09-07

Triggers & Channel Coverage Partial

Agent-initiated operation is documented in the legal tier: the agentic systems initiate workflows and communicate with the customer where appropriate, requesting clarification or additional documentation, without routine human review, and the homepage's connect-then-come-back-when-done model describes an ongoing service working over arriving data. No customer-set schedule, no connected-system event classes, no webhook and no channel beyond the application and its outreach is documented.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai/privacy-policy and synthetic.airead 2026-09-07

Model Flexibility & Routing Not documented

The vendor runs its own stack, described on the site as a new kind of AI with tools built specifically for the job, and the legal tier confirms unnamed third-party cloud infrastructure supporting our AI models with a per-user-only training restriction on Gmail data; no model provider is named and no customer or admin choice of model is documented anywhere.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Not documented

No API, SDK, MCP surface or developer documentation exists anywhere. The embeddable Stripe-like service sits under the site's own Our Aspiration framing and the release's long-term vision, so it is a plan rather than a product; the consent clause about authorizing a third-party application to access a Synthetic account is template boilerplate rather than a documented interface, and export of the books is a download, not a callable surface.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Testing, Debugging & Optimization Not documented

No harness, test set, readable result, release gate or live metric on the agent is published for customers. Working with design partners to validate reliability, and the privacy policy's quality assurance and testing language, describe the vendor's own development practice, and the founder's public standard, that nothing releases until it is more reliable than a human bookkeeper, is the vendor's release criterion rather than something the customer can run.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

Browser & Computer Use Not documented

The agent works through account connections and reads email content via the Google Workspace APIs rather than driving a browser or operating a computer; no interface control and no open research per case at run time is documented.

SourceSynthetic, synthetic.ai and synthetic.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-07

The Agentic Index coverage score grades every vendor Full, Partial or Not documented against the same 14 buyer facing capabilities, from public evidence only. Each capability links to how all vendors in the index score on it. How this evidence is graded

Pricing

Waitlist only; no published pricing

not published

What is public

Nothing on the site. The seed release announced pricing that will begin at about $49 a month, roughly a quarter of a human staffed service.

Billing mechanics

Not established. The seed release describes a flat monthly subscription starting around $49, positioned well below human staffed bookkeeping, and the product is still with design partners; ask the vendor at access.

Cost watchouts

The product is early and pre general availability, so the $49 starting price is a stated intention rather than a finalized tier, and scope is limited to simple software startup books today.

Variable cost rationale

Positioned as a flat, low monthly subscription rather than usage based pricing, so cost is predictable, subject to change as the early product reaches general availability.

Additional watchouts

Treat the $49 price as an early stated starting point, confirm availability for your entity type, and note the product is young and narrowly scoped to simple software startup books.

Sales call required

No, self serve available

Free / trial

Working with early design partners; a public free tier is not offered

Key ambiguities

No pricing is published; the $49 a month figure was announced with the seed round as future pricing, and the price at general availability may differ.

Agentic Index verified 2026-09-07

Alternatives to Synthetic

The closest documented capability profiles to Synthetic among enterprise operations agents tracked by Agentic Index, ordered by similarity on the same 14 point evidence the rankings use. No vendor pays for placement.

  • Smart Bricks3.5 / 14Fuller documented coverage on Knowledge Grounding & RAG
  • CapOut2.0 / 14A lighter documented profile than Synthetic
  • HackerEarth4.0 / 14Adds documented Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs and APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility
  • Paraform4.0 / 14Adds documented Security, Identity & Governance and Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs
  • Balerion AI4.5 / 14Adds documented Security, Identity & Governance
  • Beroe2.5 / 14Fuller documented coverage on Workflow Orchestration

Similarity is computed from each vendor's Agentic Index coverage score evidence, axis by axis, not from the totals. How this evidence is graded

Head to head

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