Mercury.ai

Khosla Ventures leads $10M seed for Ian Crosby's Synthetic

Khosla Ventures led a $10 million Seed round for Synthetic, a startup founded by Ian Crosby that aims to build a fully autonomous AI bookkeeper capable of generating accrual-based financials without human accountants. The product is still in design and Crosby acknowledges current foundational models may not yet be fully capable; he says the company can wait while models improve. Investors in the round include Basis Set Ventures and Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke. The article notes Crosby's controversial history: his prior company, Bench, shut down in 2024 after management changes and was later acquired; Crosby was removed by Bench's board in 2021. Khosla partner Jon Chu said he backed Crosby despite the founder's past, citing belief in founder growth and learning from subsequent roles Crosby held at Shopify and other startups.

Dessn raises $6M for production design tool

Dessn, a startup building a production‑focused design tool that runs customers' codebases in the cloud without setup, has raised $6 million. The round was led by Connect Ventures with participation from Betaworks and N49P. Founded by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn aims to give designers high-fidelity access to production environments so handoffs to engineers are simpler. Early customers include Color, Wispr and Mercury. The product offers a free tier (one repository and five prompts weekly) and paid plans starting at $39 per user/month. The four-person company plans selective integrations (Slack, meeting notetakers) but says it will not integrate with Figma to preserve its production-first focus.