From Humanities To AI: How Ali Hussain Built Fintech Tabs Into A $400M Startup

figure — editor’s note: The following is the third profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interviews with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, and Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here.

Ali Hussain spent much of his childhood in his family’s St. Paul, Minnesota, convenience store, where he packed cigarette cartons and watched his father run a business seven days a week, 365 days a year. Hussain was the son of a first-generation immigrant who arrived from Karachi, Pakistan, and worked his way from employment at a 7-Eleven to owning his own corner store. That experience instilled in Hussain a work ethic that stuck with him. But his father made a clear trade-off with him in high school. Ali Hussain, founder of Tabs. (Courtesy photo) “My dad didn’t want me to necessarily come back to the store,” Hussain recalls. “He’s like, ‘Look, like this is what I did and built. Go use school as a mechanism to leave.’ ” Ultimately, Hussain went on to form Tabs, a New York-based AI startup that automates parts of finance and accounting. Founded in 2023, the company has raised around $90 million, employs about 180 people, and was last valued at $400 million, according to Hussain. But unlike many tech startup founders, Hussain didn’t study computer science in college. Instead, he earned a humanities degree at Cornell, won a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford, left academia abruptly to work at The Boston Consulting Group, and spent six years learning the operational ropes at early-stage startup Latch before launching Tabs in 2023. From St. Paul to Oxford Hussain leveraged a scholarship from the Telluride Association to attend Cornell, where he fell in love with comparative politics and history. Fixated on academia, he graduated and immediately headed to Oxford to pursue a Ph.D.