Ecommerce accounting

Synder

The bookkeeping fix two founders first built for themselves

Michael Astreiko could not find an app to move his company's Stripe and PayPal payments into QuickBooks. The tool he and Ilya Kisel built instead is now used by 5,000+ businesses worldwide, Synder says.

Spotlight Images: Synder, Business Insider

Synder co-founders Ilya Kisel and Michael Astreiko

5,000+businesses worldwide use SynderCompany-reported, as of Oct 2026 · Source for 5,000+ businesses worldwide use Synder
$30.8Bin transaction amounts synced since launch, across all currenciesCompany-reported, as of Dec 2025 · Source for $30.8B in transaction amounts synced since launch, across all currencies
41Msales, refunds, fees and payouts recorded in 2025Company-reported, as of Dec 2025 · Source for 41M sales, refunds, fees and payouts recorded in 2025

Founders: Michael Astreiko; Ilya Kisel
HQ: San Francisco, US
Sector: Fintech, accounting automation
Website: Visit Synder

Born Capital is an investor in Synder.

The story

Their own problem first

In 2016 Michael Astreiko founded CloudBusiness. Its first product moved spreadsheets into accounting systems, and its subscribers paid through PayPal and Stripe. Getting those payments into QuickBooks Online, in the right categories, became Astreiko's own chore. He found no marketplace app that handled both processors, and forum threads showed other owners doing the same work by hand in Excel. So the team built a tool for its own use, then offered it to other QuickBooks users through the app marketplace. In 2018 Astreiko and co-founder Ilya Kisel turned it into a product of its own.

A day in London

In February 2018 Astreiko and a few developers went to an Intuit small-business hackathon at CodeNode in London to meet people in the field. Teams had 24 hours to build something that would save a small company time or money. Their entry, Flawless, sorted transactions into categories by itself. It won, and became the prototype of Synder's automatic categorization. The team was a top-ten finalist in the QuickBooks App Showdown in 2018 and 2019, the year the product launched with Stripe, PayPal and Square. In early 2020 it dropped its first name, Business Payments, as too broad. Kisel pictured the accountant as Cinderella, racing the clock before the ball. Sync plus Cinderella gave Synder.

About sixty Synder staff in white on a lawn, arms raised — The Synder team.

The salon that went online

Hairdressers and barbers taking payments through Square's point-of-sale system were among the early users, until COVID-19 closed many of their shops in 2020. One long-time customer, a beauty salon owner named Jade, wrote to support to cancel. The team came back with an idea: a payment link in her Instagram bio. She started teaching beauty routines in Instagram classes, paid through Synder. Customers moving online kept asking for Shopify and Amazon. In September 2020 Synder added both, plus eBay and Ecwid, and by December Astreiko said Shopify sellers made up a quarter of new users. By year end, Synder reported, $1 billion in ecommerce transactions had run through it since September.

Bootstrapped, then tested

Synder spent three years growing to thousands of customers without outside money. In 2021 it raised a $2 million seed round in about six weeks. Months later came a harder test. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Synder's R&D staff worked from Belarus and Ukraine. The company moved colleagues at risk to its offices in Poland and Lithuania, found housing for refugees and closed its Belarus office, with no plan to reopen it. The product kept expanding: revenue recognition for subscription businesses in 2024, NetSuite in May 2025. In October 2025 Synder reached the Platinum tier of Intuit's App Partner Program.

Rules first, AI on top

In a Synder case study, the finance manager of Stape, a SaaS company on Stripe and Xero, says she now works through and checks a month's data in about 40 minutes, a job she put at two days or more by hand. Syncing, categorizing and reconciling stay rule-based, scheduled and logged, and Synder has cited sellers who doubted the accuracy of AI-generated reports. The AI works from those books. Ask AI Dashboards, launched in beta in May 2025, for last quarter's Amazon fees and the answer comes back as a chart or table. Synder's MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor check every client's sync health, explain a failed sync and plan a fix that runs once a person approves it. In November 2025 Synder ran its own 24-hour AI hackathon, in Wrocław.

Visit synder.com

AI at Synder

Synder posts sales, payouts, fees and refunds from more than 30 sales channels and payment platforms to QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite and Sage Intacct, through a rules-based accounting engine. AI works on top of those books, and every change it proposes waits for the user's approval.

AI Dashboards answer plain-English questions about sales, fees and taxes
An AI agent diagnoses failed syncs and plans the fix
Suggests integration settings and rules from a plain-language description of the business

The founders

Michael Astreiko
Co-founder and CEO
Trained in physics and wrote Java for a living, then spent a decade advising startups on technology before starting his own.
Ilya Kisel
Co-founder and COO
Has a background in ecommerce sales. Leads partnerships, shapes marketing and sales strategy and keeps the company's daily operations aligned.

Milestones

2016
Michael Astreiko founds CloudBusiness, the company behind Synder
2018Feb
Wins Intuit's small-business hackathon in London with Flawless, a categorization prototype
2019
Launches with Stripe, PayPal and Square, under its first name, Business Payments
2020Sep
Adds Shopify, Amazon, eBay and Ecwid; reports $1 billion in ecommerce transactions by year end
2021Aug
Announces a $2 million seed round
2025May
Launches AI Dashboards in beta
2025Oct
Reaches the Platinum tier of Intuit's App Partner Program