AI bookkeeping startup Ceedar is turning customers into investors

While running a tech solutions agency, husband-and-wife team Connor Turland and Pegah Vaezi grew frustrated with their bookkeeping options.

“Our vision is to be the powerhouse, [the] power plant for the Canadian digital economy.”
Connor Turland
Ceedar

“All the software we tried … was made for accountants, not business owners,” Vaezi told BetaKit. “We decided to be the solution.”

Vaezi is now chief product officer at Ceedar, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bookkeeping software platform that claims to be “the last bookkeeper you’ll need to hire.” Alongside CEO Turland, Vaezi has secured $200,000 USD ($275,000 CAD) in funding from Vancouver-based Metalab Ventures and turned multiple customers into angel investors.

Founded in 2023 in Victoria, BC, Ceedar claims to automate the bookkeeping process by simplifying financial reporting, maximizing tax deductions, providing weekly insights, and ensuring compliance with Canadian tax laws. It also integrates with an existing tech stack fuelled by an ecosystem of startups, the co-founders said, by pulling payments data from Stripe and expense data from FinTech business banking platforms Wise and Venn.

The startup got its first sparks of interest from an investor thanks to BC-based entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson, founder of tech-focused holding company Tiny. Wilkinson connected Ceedar with Metalab, a technological design firm he founded in 2006, which is now investing in product-focused startups out of a $15-million USD venture fund.

“Bookkeeping remains heavily dependent on administrative labour and outdated legacy software,” Metalab Ventures general partner David Tapp told BetaKit. “Early signals [to Ceedar] in the way of user feedback and retention were incredibly strong.”

Mark Nichols, founder of digital consultancy Tamaribuchi and the third employee at Metalab, was a Ceedar customer and decided to invest because he saw the product’s potential for new entrepreneurs.

“What this new wave of entrepreneurs really need is a set of tools to make the process of getting a business started less daunting,” Nichols told BetaKit. “Ceedar is amazing because it alleviates that stress so thoroughly and without much time.”

Other customers-turned-investors include Shawn Adrian and Gavin Vickery, the co-founders of BC-based software agency InputLogic. And these early adopters have already tipped Ceedar into profitability, the co-founders claim. Though Turland and Vaezi declined to disclose revenue figures, they say Ceedar saw 70-percent month-over-month revenue growth in Q1.

Ceedar is playing in a crowded market of AI-powered accounting tools for enterprises, such as Canadian company Una Software and large incumbents, including Intuit’s Quickbooks. The sector has also seen some firms struggle to reach profitability and others face insolvency.

This was the case with Vancouver’s Bench, a bookkeeping tech scaleup that mainly served startups and small businesses. In December, the company abruptly shut down after a bank reportedly called in its venture debt, but was acquired days later by Employer.com, which brought back more than half of Bench’s team. Bench had previously raised more than $100 million in funding, but one source told BetaKit it was burning cash to the point of insolvency.

Turland believes that Ceedar can succeed where Bench struggled because it had the opportunity to build generative AI into its product from the beginning, an advantage not afforded to firms founded before the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

“There was basically no way to scale without humans,” Turland said. “There weren’t algorithms suitable for solving the kinds of human problems that you deal with in bookkeeping.”

Turland and Vaezi have built an in-house AI agent they claim can replace the work of software engineers—an approach that mirrors an industry trend of reduced hiring as teams turn to AI tools in an attempt to cut costs. According to an analysis by financial data firm Carta, the average headcount of North American FinTech startups decreased from 7.2 employees in 2022 to 5.3 employees in 2024. Ceedar is currently a four-person team.

Turland added that Ceedar plans to keep a narrow focus on its first customer niche: digital service-based businesses, like agencies and consultancies. That way, it says it can perfect its product there, gain a base of long-term customers, and stay profitable.

Ceedar’s product is only available in Canada for now, but the startup plans to expand into the American market soon.

“Our vision is to be the powerhouse, [the] power plant for the Canadian digital economy,” Turland said.

Feature image courtesy Ceedar.