Episode #93: Meet the Startup Revolutionizing B2B With Revenue Automation

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  Samantha Herrick:
  Hello trailblazers and dreamers. Welcome to The Tech Optimist, the podcast where innovation takes center stage and tomorrow’s breakthroughs fuel today’s conversations. I’m Samantha Herrick, your guide and producer through this whirlwind of visionary ideas and transformative technologies. But today, we’re flipping the script—no rules, no boundaries—just raw, unfiltered exploration into the ideas shaping our future. If you think you’ve seen it all, think again. This is The Tech Optimist, where we dare to imagine differently. Hang tight. After this brief message and disclaimer, we’ll get right back to the action.

  Speaker 2:
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  Samantha Herrick:
  As a reminder, The Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

  Think about this for a moment: Over half of all B2B invoices in the United States—55%—are overdue. That’s trillions of dollars stuck in limbo, creating massive headaches for small and medium-sized businesses. These delays don’t just clog financial pipelines; they stunt business growth, drain resources, and leave finance teams buried in inefficient processes.

  Ali Hussain:
  I am the founder and CEO of Tabs. We are a New York-based tech company focused on the office of the CFO.

  Samantha Herrick:
  But what if there were a smarter way to manage accounts receivable? Enter Tabs, our guest company today—an AI-powered platform co-founded by our guest, Ali Hussain, and Deepak Bapat.

  Ali Hussain:
  Fast-forward to now: Tabs is the first AI-native revenue automation platform. Our ultimate mission is to help companies save time, collect faster, and report more accurately.

  Samantha Herrick:
  With a mission to reimagine B2B AR processes, Tabs uses cutting-edge technology to tackle these inefficiencies head-on. From automating invoices and payments to delivering insights that can transform a company’s trajectory, Tabs is reshaping how businesses manage their cash flow. Ali Hussain, who previously scaled Latch from seed to IPO, knows these challenges intimately. Drawing from his experience, he’s built Tabs to streamline operations and help finance teams collect faster, all while saving them valuable time. Today, we’re diving into how Tabs is solving one of the biggest bottlenecks in B2B commerce.

  Ali Hussain:
  Broadly, there’s a lot to be desired in perhaps the most important part of the finance stack, which is the flow of funds in and all things revenue. About two-plus years ago, my founding team and I saw where AI was headed. We felt it was the right moment to innovate around revenue given the complexity of commercial records.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Today, we’re diving into the career of someone who truly knows how to navigate the intersection of operations, technology, and innovation—Ali Hussain, the CEO and co-founder of Tabs. Ali’s journey is nothing short of extraordinary, blending academic excellence, entrepreneurial spirit, and a knack for solving real-world problems.

  His professional career took off at the Boston Consulting Group, where he honed his skills in strategy and operations. He then joined Latch, a smart lock company, as COO, growing it from its early days to its successful IPO. This experience exposed him to inefficiencies in accounts receivable processes, inspiring the creation of Tabs in 2023. As CEO of Tabs, Ali has already led the company to secure $7 million in seed funding and a recent $250 million Series A, bringing innovation to the AR space with AI-driven technology. He’s not just a leader—he’s someone reshaping how B2B businesses manage their cash flow.

  Ali Hussain:
  The way we do that is that our native platform takes all unstructured customer records—contracts, MSAs, purchase orders, usage milestones—and activates that data into powerful operational workflows. Whether it’s billing, cash collections, or revenue recognition, we provide a powerful horizontal platform for finance teams in B2B.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Excellent. So any type of finance function or finance professional in a business that’s generating revenue would benefit from this type of platform.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Now let’s shine a spotlight on Wesley Yiu, a partner at Alumni Ventures and one of the sharpest minds driving innovation and investment in today’s fast-paced venture capital landscape. Wesley has been with Alumni Ventures since 2018, building his career through roles as senior associate, principal, and senior principal before stepping into his current leadership position as partner. Wesley also leads as a partner at Triphammer Ventures, a fund dedicated to leveraging the power of the Cornell alumni network to identify standout startups.

  At Alumni Ventures, Wesley evaluates investment opportunities, manages portfolios, and connects founders to the resources they need to thrive. Some of his recent investments include cutting-edge companies like Cytovale, Centaur Labs, and Operant, spanning diverse sectors from FinTech to IoT and SaaS.

  Every startup starts with a problem, and Tabs is no exception. Ali shares the driving force behind his idea: a deep frustration with inefficiencies in finance workflows and the untapped potential of AI. From understanding the complexity of unstructured data to harnessing AI for revenue operations, Ali explains why now was the perfect time to launch Tabs.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Did you find Tabs based on personal experience—any challenges you had in your prior career that led you to this “aha” moment that this needed to exist?

  Ali Hussain:
  Yeah, I think twofold. I’ve been a COO for many years, and often the COO deals with the ERP stack. I’ve taken businesses from QuickBooks to NetSuite and saw the amount of human capital and mental drain it takes to do this manually in a product like NetSuite or QuickBooks. That was highly influential in starting Tabs.

  Additionally, I spent a lot of time doing my 10,000 hours with many other finance leaders to see: was this just Ali being a bad operator, or is this a broader theme? I ultimately validated that—the verdict is still out on my operational capabilities—but it’s at least a consistent theme seen among hundreds of other B2B teams I spoke with.

  Wesley Yiu:
  And you’ve been a former startup executive prior to this. You were at Latch for a number of years. You pretty much started from the early days all the way through when it became a public company.

  Ali Hussain:
  Yeah.

  Wesley Yiu:
  How has your prior experience as a startup executive impacted how you build Tabs as a new company?

  Ali Hussain:
  Absolutely. I think as an operator and just getting to be on a great ride like I did at Latch, you get to learn a lot about how companies are built. Over my career, I fleshed out three themes that I think matter most for being a founder or entrepreneur.

  One is you go after a large TAM. The number of B2B companies in the U.S. and globally is massive. They rely on finance stacks like an ERP and need workflows like billing, revenue recognition, collections, and payments. That’s a fundamental operational use case in a very large TAM.

  Second, if you go after a large problem, the number one thing that matters is understanding the technological change happening in space and tying that to the problem with intense focus. Technology evolves in waves while the general problem stays the same. The key is focusing on the intersection of the “why now” with a big problem or opportunity.

  And third, the team just matters. If you can bring together superpowers greater than yourself—smart people who are excited to work together and collaborate—the collective mental capacity compounds with focus and can build something truly compelling. That’s the way I like to build products, and I’ve been fortunate to see that play out over the last year.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Successful companies are obviously built by successful teams. You’re the co-founder and CEO, but you’ve brought great people along for the ride as other co-founders. You touched on it earlier, but why did you choose your specific co-founders? What are their key skill sets? How do they coordinate with you to help make Tabs successful?

  Ali Hussain:
  Yeah, a few things. As CEO, you have to understand what you’re strong at and where you need really intelligent and powerful minds to make things happen. When building a company, you need to drive demand and build supply.

  Demand means having customers who are willing to pay, which involves marketing, sales, and sometimes customer success. Supply involves creating the product, building software with velocity, and providing the operational and implementation know-how to deliver it.

  As a non-technical founder and not necessarily a visionary product founder, I needed certain skill sets in my founding team to collaborate daily and make everything happen in parallel quickly.

  I needed someone as good or better than me on the demand side, spending 10 to 15 hours a day with customers to deeply understand their needs. I also needed thoughtful product and engineering minds who could rapidly design and ship products as we learned more about AI and its applications. Early on, velocity is everything, especially for a B2B product with high-value contracts.

  Additionally, you need a group that’s highly collaborative and creates a psychologically safe environment where good deliberation and alignment happen. That allows everyone to divide and conquer, then return aligned. That formula was crucial to designing our team and has been incredibly important for maintaining momentum 24 months later.

  Samantha Herrick:
  All right. This seems like a good time to take a break. Here’s an ad, and we’ll be right back.

  Speaker 2:
  Exceptional value creation comes from solving hard problems. Alumni Ventures Deep Tech Fund is a portfolio of 20 to 30 ventures run by exceptional teams tackling huge opportunities in AI, space, energy, transportation, cybersecurity, and more. These game-changing ventures have strong lead investors and practical approaches to creating shareholder value. If you’re interested in investing in the future of deep tech, visit av.vc/deeptech to learn more.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Raising capital in today’s market is no small feat, but Tabs secured investments from industry giants like Lightspeed and General Catalyst. Ali discusses the importance of simplicity in storytelling, building investor trust, and why founder recommendations are the ultimate game changer in fundraising.

  Wesley Yiu:
  You’ve been extremely successful in raising capital—not only raising capital but also from great investors like Lightspeed and General Catalyst. What’s been the reason for that success? How have you navigated this tougher fundraising environment?

  Ali Hussain:
  I’ll talk about what matters most and some tactical points that are also valuable. One mistake founders often make in the last few years is overcomplicating their message. In the AI world, people create talking points that sound great internally but confuse others when communicated externally.

  The number one thing I’ve found helpful is simplicity. While we’re excited about complex technologies and AI, you have to communicate from first principles: your mission statement, the problem you’re solving, why now, how you’re addressing it today, and where it’s going.

  Communicate in a way that almost anyone can understand—not just VCs or technologists, but even your aunt, uncle, cousin, or friend with no interest in tech. That’s a good test of simplicity.

  Secondly, you need deep trust and focus. Show that you’re customer-obsessed and can deliver a solution that meets customer needs today while anticipating where the market is going. Demonstrate how venture dollars will help you achieve both. I think that’s the most important thing.

  Ali Hussain:
  The second piece, Wesley—I see this all the time, and it was hard for me at first too—is revenue just matters. Even at the pre-seed and seed stage, a lot of founders, including myself in the early days, think, “Well, we have to build all this stuff and handle all these other things.” But at the end of the day, the number one thing—particularly if you’re the founder/CEO—is you need to buckle down and show real demand for the product. At every stage, aspire to drive the highest revenue targets and make no excuses about it. Revenue is more important than ever. Even if it’s not the highest number, you must be pragmatic because everything else figures itself out.

  Those are the two main points. Tactically, it’s always important to run a process. Raising a round is not rolling admissions. Be very thoughtful about when you’re ready—your materials, your model, your data room—and then go hard over a two- to three-week process. Don’t just have a nine-month coffee socializing period for the sake of it. This is not rolling admissions.

  I’ve also been very lucky that the most powerful momentum comes from introductions by other amazing founders. Many people look for direct connections or investor-to-investor introductions, but nothing drives momentum like a founder who has successfully worked with an investor saying, “Look, I know this other founder, I’ve seen their product, and it’s excellent.” A founder standing up for another founder creates the strongest flywheel effect.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Yep, absolutely. For us, we’ve known you for a number of years—even before Tabs. We got to know you when you were still at Latch. That’s how we became comfortable with you and the vision you set out for your new company. So I definitely think relationships are important, and introductions are important.

  Ali Hussain:
  100%.

  Wesley Yiu:
  As investors, we’ve seen the bar for fundraising raised significantly. To your point, revenue, traction, and clear demonstrated product-market fit are extremely important for early-stage companies. It sounds like you had that covered when you went into the fundraising process.

  Ali Hussain:
  Totally. Part of it was getting great mentorship. Nothing is stronger than solid customer testimonials. More than ever, I’ve seen investors really doing diligence with the end customer—understanding who they are, directly reaching out, and gaining intense conviction that something real is there before engaging. I think those first-principle fundamentals matter the most.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Absolutely. So, 2024 was a strong year for you—new customers, fresh off a Series A. As we step into 2025, what’s the near-term plan for Tabs, and what’s your longer-term vision for the company?

  Ali Hussain:
  2024 was a lot of fun. We were fortunate to secure funding, build compelling products, and, most importantly, serve a broad and diverse customer base. The key now is to rinse and repeat—we have a long way to go to build a category-defining company.

  For 2025, I told the team at our recent all-hands that if 2025 looks a lot like 2024, it’s a really good year. That means staying focused, being maniacal about driving customer demand, focusing on the same ICP, and repeating what worked. That’s number one.

  Number two is continuing to build products with intense velocity. Even if everything isn’t perfect, velocity is the number one driver toward stronger product-market fit. The tagline for 2025 is essentially: more of the same—just faster and bigger.

  What excites me most is that we’ve been one of the first AI-native companies in this space. Our initial wedge was around converting unstructured data into structured data. Now that we have a large customer base and high platform throughput, we can build far more intelligence into the platform—capabilities that traditional systems of record could never have offered.

  Like many AI-forward companies, we’re still figuring out where to prioritize building versus partnering. While there’s noise around agents, I believe 2025 will see truly semi-agentic, magical in-platform experiences that help finance teams save time, collect faster, and do more with less. Not all of this will be finished in 2025, but I think we’ll see a step change in capabilities that were previously impossible.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Okay. You mentioned ICP earlier. For Tabs, what’s your core ICP, and why should that community be excited about what you’re building?

  Ali Hussain:
  Our ICP is typically companies that are growing fast and have hit seven figures of revenue. If you’re still pre-product-market fit with only early customers, you likely have other challenges to solve first before focusing heavily on revenue ops. But once you reach that traction level, Tabs is a great partner to make revenue administration more efficient—from finance teams in high-growth startups to mid-market and early enterprise companies.

  We do particularly well with high-growth venture-backed companies, private equity-backed companies, and growth-stage funds—all in the B2B space.

  These finance teams are often very lean, sometimes even led by a fractional CFO. Post-2022, finance teams are even leaner and are looking for a more precise, automated finance stack to do more with less. Many companies are staying on products like QuickBooks much longer or avoiding buggy, services-heavy ERPs like NetSuite or Sage. Instead, they rely heavily on modern products like Rippling, Ramp, and Tabs to run workflows that would have traditionally required human spreadsheets or outsourced services.

  B2B finance and operating teams should be excited because it’s a time of renewed growth. As companies invest across their businesses, finance is now an area where you can lean on AI-native tools like Tabs to keep teams focused on strategic work while deferring tactical processes—billing, revenue recognition, cash forecasting, and renewal management—to operational AI software.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Great. Last question from me—zooming out. You’re obviously a FinTech company. FinTech as a whole has struggled in recent years as the environment shifted. Now that we’re in 2025, do you see signs of a new renaissance for the sector?

  Ali Hussain:
  I think so. The area that’s going to be really exciting in FinTech is that there was a lot of reset, competition, and commoditization of the technical elements of FinTech—payments and similar technologies we’ve traditionally tied to FinTech. I believe the renaissance will happen in the aspects that make FinTech-adjacent workflows and work more efficient and magical.

  Three years ago, during the last FinTech boom, what often got lost were the adjacent workflows and human-related dependencies that didn’t advance much due to the pre-AI era. I think the renaissance will happen in creating magical experiences around the technical or commoditized parts of FinTech, like payments, to drive greater efficiencies.

  For example, in B2B payments in the United States, the vast majority of transactions still happen via non-digital or analog methods—ACH, credit, wire, even physical checks. Even with the COVID-era push toward digital payments, there’s still a large portion left to modernize.

  Where experiences will truly become magical is when technologies like Tabs can influence how customers pay by providing intelligence. Tabs can tell a CFO, “You should accept credit card payments not just because it’s easier, but because it reduces your average days to pay by 20 days, or it lowers your bad debt.” That level of intelligence to drive the why versus just the what is going to be incredibly powerful in FinTech over the next 36 months. We hope to be a big part of that tailwind.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Fantastic. Ali, this has been great. Appreciate you taking the time to share insights and introduce the community to Tabs. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for you this year and beyond.

  Ali Hussain:
  Absolutely. Wesley, thanks for being an amazing investor and partner. I’m excited for listeners to hopefully consider joining the Tabs family—whether as a team member, a partner, or a customer. Thank you so much for the time.

  Wesley Yiu:
  Excellent. Folks, thanks for joining us on The Tech Optimist podcast today. Stay tuned for future episodes.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Thanks again for tuning into The Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a rating on whichever podcast app you’re using, and remember to subscribe to keep up with each episode. The Tech Optimist welcomes any questions, comments, or segment suggestions. Please email us at info@techoptimist.vc with any of those, and be sure to visit our website at av.vc. As always, keep building.