Omar Qari and the art of making work disappear

An expense report is a peculiar monument to office life. Someone buys something. Someone else needs to know about it. Between those two ordinary events, a small administrative civilization springs up: receipts, categories, approvals, reminders, and the quiet financing of a company by its employees. Omar Qari helped build Abacus around a question that sounds almost rude in a software meeting: why should the report exist at all?

That question gives his career a useful shape. Qari is the co-founder and original CEO of Abacus, the expense management business acquired by Certify in 2018. He now runs Logicbroker, which connects retailers, brands and suppliers. The distance between a taxi receipt and a retail supply chain looks considerable. His recurring interest is the work people perform to keep imperfect systems talking to one another.

He has spent years looking for those handoffs. They are rarely the glamorous part of a business. They are where somebody waits for their money, retypes a number, checks an exception or explains the same thing again. A surprising amount of enterprise software can be understood by following the person who has been asked to do all four.

The $400 introduction to startup life

Qari's first taste of a technology startup came in 2003, while he was an undergraduate at Wake Forest University. The company was Cflix, a video streaming service aimed at college campuses. Students had fast campus internet connections and limited enthusiasm for paying for cable. The distribution opportunity was sitting in their dorm rooms.

His title was marketing consultant. Looking back, he thought campus ambassador would have been a better description. The job paid $400 a month. He remembered it as an introduction to the less recreational side of startup work, well before he had a company of his own. Streaming video was an ambitious place to begin; campus marketing was a fairly direct way to discover how much work ambition requires.

He studied computer science at Wake Forest and later pursued an MBA at Wharton. His background also included commercial banking and private equity. Those experiences put him close to both the construction of software and the financial machinery around it. By the time Abacus emerged, he had seen business from several seats, including the seat occupied by the person trying to get a task finished.

Three founders, one townhouse

Abacus brought Qari together with Ted Power and Joshua Halickman. Power's background included design at Foursquare; Halickman's included engineering at Etsy. The company joined Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch, taking its New York founders west for three months of concentrated work.

Qari later described that stretch as three people working in a townhouse for 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Being away from his wife made the arrangement difficult, even as it made the work intensely productive. California offered another small consolation: he could follow reports of the East Coast polar vortex from somewhere rather more temperate.

After the program, they returned to New York. He had grown up around the city and considered it home. His affection for it extended beyond business: he recommended the birthday cake cupcake at Molly's Cupcakes with the specificity of someone who had completed the necessary fieldwork.

The two coasts offered different kinds of stimulation. California surrounded him with ambitious new projects. New York supplied the dense, varied daily problems those projects might actually solve. For a business devoted to the back office, proximity to people doing business had its uses.

A receipt could travel alone

Abacus treated an expense as something that could move through a business when it happened. Mobile submission, approval and reimbursement replaced the habit of collecting transactions into a report at the end of a period. The employee's purchase and the company's response could happen much closer together.

In 2014, Qari said the seed fundraising process had taken roughly a week from start to handshake. The speed came after more than a year of work. The team had customers and a little revenue before raising. His advice to other founders was to avoid rushing toward a financing round simply because financing was available.

The investor list ranged from institutional firms to founders of Stripe and Venmo. Yet the underlying proposition remained wonderfully unceremonious. People wanted their money back. Managers wanted sufficient context. Finance teams wanted usable records. None of those desires required anybody to spend a pleasant afternoon arranging receipts.

As Abacus reached larger organizations, the connections became more consequential. Its NetSuite integration moved expense information into accounting workflows. Qari talked about the difficulty of reconciling books when information had to be pulled from several places. An expense already captured on a phone should not require another person to introduce it to the accounting system.

Corporate cards presented another opportunity. In 2016, Abacus gained direct access to American Express transaction data with customer permission. Amounts, merchants and dates could flow into suggested expenses, alongside richer details where available. Employees still reviewed and submitted them. The product was steadily reducing the amount of clerical preparation required before that decision.

By 2016, the company was also taking approvals into Slack. Qari's explanation was practical: people were already working there. Notifications should direct their attention to the expenses that needed a decision. Software could handle the more predictable cases without requesting a fresh ceremony for each one.

“Productivity to us doesn’t mean spending time in Abacus, it means getting your work done.”

Omar Qari, 2016

That is an unusually demanding definition of success for an application. It asks the product to justify every interruption. A busy screen can look like activity while leaving the actual work untouched. Qari's standard gave the customer permission to leave.

The company keeps being founded

His advice to founders had a similarly practical cast. In a 2016 essay, he urged them to investigate a customer's problem before falling in love with a proposed solution. Early conversations mattered, especially when they revealed that the supposed problem was not high on the customer's list.

He also advocated the kinds of attention that a young company could provide before scale made them difficult: visits, personal service, a quick response. Culture needed deliberate care as a team expanded. These were instructions from someone discovering that building software also meant building the organization that would keep improving it.

Certify acquired Abacus in July 2018. The acquisition joined a wider collection of expense management businesses backed by K1 Investment Management. For Qari, a transaction opened another operating chapter. His subsequent work at Emburse included strategic partnerships and corporate development, extending his attention from a single product to the relationships among products and companies.

In 2023, he announced a move to an operating partner role at K1, while continuing at that point as an Emburse board advisor. He thanked the colleagues who had made room for acquired founders to keep building. He also thanked the early customers who had taken a chance before Abacus became an easy purchasing decision.

Two years later, he returned publicly to the question of who gets to shape a company. Some of the ideas that changed Abacus's direction, he wrote, had come from people beyond its three founders. Listening had been part of the founders' job. The opportunity to change a business's course belonged to the people who joined later, too.

That observation softens the familiar mythology of the founding team. A company can acquire new authors without changing the names on its origin story. Qari's own journey through acquisition and continued operating work helps explain why the distinction interests him.

The next handoff is a shopping cart

Logicbroker announced Qari as CEO in February 2025. Its business connects trading partners and supports work such as catalog management, order fulfillment and reporting. He arrived promising investment in the core technology, broader connectivity and more automation. The setting had changed; the concern with information moving between organizations was familiar.

In 2026, his attention has turned to what happens when AI assistants help customers find and buy products. In a conversation with Logicbroker marketing executive Bryce Roberts, he examined the operational implications of that change. Product data, inventory and the rules governing a transaction become part of whether a retailer can participate effectively.

His own writing makes the issue tangible. A product recommendation creates an expectation that somebody must fulfill. When an assistant helps arrange a time-sensitive purchase, an inaccurate inventory record or an unreliable delivery promise still lands with the customer. A more fluent interface cannot repair a missing item.

At London's Vision Summit in September 2026, Qari drew attention to the people who quietly compensate for gaps in a company's systems. Their knowledge keeps operations moving, often without being fully documented. Preparing for agents involves making that context usable in the catalog, the policies and the data. The work begins with understanding what those people know.

He is making room for human judgment within that argument. In October, he described the move toward AI as a task-by-task process. Relationships, coaching and difficult interpersonal situations still require people. His interest in automation leaves a substantial job for the person who understands both the business and the customer.

Outside work, his executive biography offers a smaller exercise in precision: trying to imitate master sushi chefs. He and his wife also divide the work of their two daughters' activities. The combination is pleasingly consistent with a career spent examining how things get done. Some tasks can be streamlined. Others reward the time and attention of the person doing them.

From Abacus to Logicbroker, Qari keeps returning to the gap between an intention and its completion. A receipt should reach the books. An order should reach the buyer. The people making either journey possible deserve tools that respect their time. He has found a considerable amount of work in that modest proposition.