Sep 10, 2024

Teal co-founders, CEO Ian Crosby and design lead Adam Saint. Acquisition comes mere months after Vancouver startup announced an $11 million CAD seed round. Share: Vancouver-based seed-stage startup Teal has been acquired by US-based FinTech firm Mercury for an undisclosed amount, the latter announced in a statement Friday. The acquisition comes mere months after the accounting tech startup announced it had raised an $11 million CAD ($8 million USD) seed round. Teal was founded last year by CEO Ian Crosby and design lead Adam Saint, both of which also co-founded Bench Accounting and later worked at e-commerce giant Shopify. In a statement, Mercury said Crosby, Saint, and the Teal team will join Mercury as part of this acqusition. Crosby’s LinkedIn profile now states he is Mercury’s head of accounting products while Saint’s profile has not been updated. Mercury declined to provide further details about the acquisition to BetaKit. BetaKit reached out to Crosby and Saint for more details but did not hear back by press time. “Accountants are important partners in the Mercury ecosystem. Now, as part of Mercury, Teal’s incredible talent, technology and expertise will strengthen what we’re doing to transform banking into a lever that helps ambitious companies operate at their best,” Mercury posted to LinkedIn . Teal provides out-of-the-box tools to help vertical software-as-a-service (VSaaS) companies launch accounting platforms, including app code repositories and native integrations with external data sources. Their goal was to help those VSaaS companies give their small-to-medium-sized business customers the ability to more easily draw insights into things like real-time cash flow, per-product profitability, access tax filings, and support from live bookkeepers. After founding Bench together in 2010, Saint left the startup in 2016 to work in various roles. He became part of Shopify’s user experience advocacy before working as a product designer for Quora. Crosby led Bench as CEO for 10 years before departing in early 2022 to join Shopify , first as product director of Shopify’s business banking offering and then as head of financial services. The duo reunited in April 2023 to create Teal. Founded in 2017, Mercury provides business banking services layered with its own FinTech offerings. The startup raised $120 million at a $1.62 billion valuation in a Series B round backed by Andreessen Horowitz in 2021. Mercury reportedly attracted more than 26,000 customers following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. According to reporting from The Information , the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) has also scrutinized one of Mercury’s partner banks for possible violations of anti–money-laundering and counterterrorism financing regulations. FDIC reportedly chastised the bank for what it claims is a lack of oversight over Mercury, citing international account openings and Mercury’s compliance system flagging a curiously low number of suspicious transactions. Feature image courtesy Teal.