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

Ian Crosby, the founder who was ousted from Bench Accounting before it collapsed in 2024, has raised a $10M seed round led by Khosla Ventures for his new startup Synthetic. The company aims to build a fully autonomous AI bookkeeping service for software and AI startups, eliminating human accountants entirely. The product is still in design phase and Crosby acknowledges current AI models still make significant bookkeeping errors, but he's betting on foundational models improving over time. Khosla partner Jon Chu backed Crosby despite the controversy, drawing parallels to Parker Conrad's post-Zenefits comeback with Rippling.