Real has raised $3.85 million in seed funding at a $15 million valuation after paying money to help crypto startups manage their money, the company’s co-founder and CEO Atikh Bana told TechCrunch exclusively.
“At a high level Acctual is just a better way to manage invoices and accounts in crypto,” Bana said. “It’s like a real automated accounts payable process for digital assets.”
The round was led by Third Prime and IDEO and included investors such as Alchemy Ventures, OrangeDAO, Soma Capital, Messari 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 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 first ideas we came up with was how can we be the future of payments for B2B,” Bana said.
Most accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) automation processes are aimed at businesses that are in the traditional financial world, as opposed to the crypto space, Bana said. “We wanted to build something on web3 and address the issues and fragmentation – and there really is an opportunity to help bring standards and processes to financial operations on web3.”
While there are a number of web3 funding-focused startups in the market, such as Bitwave or Cryptio, Acctual aims to differentiate itself by focusing on “breadth versus depth,” Bana said. “When you’re trying to be an accounting product, that’s it too [an accounts] payables and receivables you are very lean. So we really want to be diligent about building the right tool that hits the pain points there.”
The founders created an automation process for AR and AP of fiat and digital assets to “make sure things get paid on time, that you don’t overpay things or pay with the wrong wallet or pay malicious invoices, things like that” , Bana said.
The financial operating system is in beta and is being tested globally by “web3 native organizations”, 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 seller or crypto wallet address, tracking and approving invoices, syncing cryptocurrencies and payments to Quickbooks or Zero.
Acctual’s long-term goal is to “be able to route payments better” and to think about “what it looks like to build a network of exchanges around the world to help with the first and last miles for crypto transactions where you can offframp,” Bana said. “Some of the different nuances that make digital assets feel like fantasy — that’s the big idea here is to make them feel like what’s being done today, but faster and better.”
