Humanities PhD dropout raised $92m for AI billing startup Tabs

Ali Hussain grew up packing cigarette cartons in his family's convenience store in St Paul, Minnesota. His father had arrived from Karachi, worked at a 7-Eleven and bought his own corner shop, which he opened seven days a week.

His father's advice was to get out. "Go use school as a mechanism to leave," Hussain recalls him saying.

School took him a long way. A Telluride Association scholarship got him to Cornell, where he studied comparative politics and history, and a Marshall Scholarship took him to Oxford for a PhD.

He lasted two months. He was 23, and decided the decade of structured academic work ahead of him was not something he controlled.

He went to the Boston Consulting Group in the Midwest instead. It taught him spreadsheet modelling and corporate process, and it did not give him the agency he had watched his father exercise behind a shop counter.

In 2015 he took what he describes as a large pay cut to join Latch, then a 10-person seed-stage startup, as its first operations hire. He stayed six years, during which the company grew to tens of millions in revenue on his account.

That period was the qualification he did not have. "Had I tried to do this directly out of Oxford or out of BCG, I think [it] would have been impossible," Hussain told Crunchbase News.

He took three rules out of it: go after large markets, hire people whose strengths are not your strengths, and build for a shift in the underlying technology.

In 2023 he applied them to Tabs, a New York company that automates revenue recognition, billing and collections. He could not write code, so he brought in Deepak Bapat, a technical co-founder, to do the part he could not.

The first round was $4m of pre-seed money, co-led by Primary Venture Partners and One Way Ventures. Hussain credits relationships built during what he calls his apprentice years.

Tabs has since raised about $92m in total and employs roughly 180 people. Hussain says the last round valued the company at $400m, and that revenue has been growing three- to four-fold year on year; neither figure is independently published.

His argument for the non-traditional route is that the detour is the training. "A lot of non-traditional folks … have to embrace a ton of volatility, even ahead of being a founder, to make the sacrifices to learn," he said.

The practical lesson for a founder without a technical degree is duller than the biography suggests. Hussain did not pitch investors on potential; he spent six years inside a small company learning how one is built, then paid for the missing skill by giving away co-founder equity.