She raised $20M from Accel to replace QuickBooks with AI. | Helen Hastings, Founder of Quanta

Episode notes

Helen was a software engineer who noticed a massive problem: accounting software for startups was broken, manual, and weeks out of date. Instead of just building a shiny new dashboard on top of legacy platforms, she decided to completely replace the offshore accounting model with AI. In this episode, Helen breaks down how she raised a $4.7M seed round pre-product as a solo founder and why she chose to build an AI-enabled service instead of pure software. She reveals the exact user research playbook she used across 200 interviews, how to rebuild a monopoly like QuickBooks, why hitting product-market fit actually forced her to stop taking new customers, and how she raised a $15M Series A. Why You Should Listen How to raise a $4.7M seed round as a solo founder with zero revenue. Why building an AI-enabled service beats selling pure SaaS. Why saying "yes" to too many customers will destroy your growth. How to conduct 200 user interviews before writing a single line of code. Why rebuilding a legacy monopoly is no longer a crazy idea.