Today, we’re excited to share that Collective has acquired Open Ledger.
When we started Collective, we were driven by a simple purpose. Self-employed people should be able to focus on their passion, not their paperwork.
To that end, we introduced the first all-in-one financial platform for the Business-of-One – providing formation, bookkeeping, payroll, taxes and support in one place – saving founders time and money. As we have built and served our community, we’ve had a deeper insight.
The future is not a back office that disappears. The future is a back office that drives itself.
A solopreneur should not have to think about quarterly taxes, categorizing transactions, or remembering deadlines. But they should always feel in control. They should know what is happening, what’s coming next, and why. They should be able to jump in as needed and be able to create new value for their business with their financial system, much like a venture-backed CEO does with their CFO and finance team.
The future of financial software is self-driving – a system that manages the complexity of running a business behind the scenes while remaining proactive, transparent and human when needed.
Open Ledger built AI-native accounting infrastructure for the next generation of financial products. By bringing them into Collective, we are taking another important step toward a more complete AI-native financial operating system, purpose-built for the backbone of the economy, Businesses-of-One.
Bringing Open Ledger into Collective gives us more flexibility and capability as we build the future of the Business-of-One. By focusing on stronger infrastructure, we expand the horizons for what we can build, how deeply we can integrate across workflows and how quickly we can move toward not just a system of record, but a system of action.
A system that works continuously on your behalf – setting aside your quarterly taxes, forecasting cash flow, identifying opportunities to save money and telling you what to do next.
A system that is the equivalent of a world-class CFO working 24/7.
There are more than 30 million self-employed people in America.
As AI continues to reshape the economy, a single person will be able to build what once required an entire company. To thrive in that world, solo business owners will need a platform that delivers the outcomes of a financial services firm with the efficiency and scalability of software — and that can work not only with them, but with the agents they are increasingly relying on.
The race to the billion-dollar Business-of-One is on.
Collective is building the financial operating system to power it.
Hooman Radfar is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and the co-founder and CEO of Collective. Hooman co-founded Collective to create a better world by supporting the largest and fastest-growing class of entrepreneurs in the world – Businesses-of-One.