Seattle-based founder Junead Khan, 25, left Microsoft last August, giving up a job paying more than $200,000 a year to work full time on Treasury, an AI personal-finance tool he had been building nights and weekends for nearly two years; he formally launched the company two months later. After being rejected by several accelerators, including Y Combinator, he treated his Microsoft savings as seed capital and remains Treasury's only employee, not yet paying himself, and says the product has paying customers and more than $6,000 in revenue. He promotes the startup by posting the process, including failures, on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and X, and says his social following has grown to about 30,000, with TikTok going from under 500 followers to more than 9,000.