Ben Franklin once said that in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes. It doesn't make dealing with either particularly natural or easy. A Berlin-based startup called Taxfix, which has built a popular mobile assistant to address the former of these, is announcing a big round of funding to fuel its growth. It has closed a Series D of $220 million at a valuation of over $1 billion, money that the startup will be using to build in more products to extend its touch points with customers beyond annual use around tax time, and to expand to new markets beyond its current footprint of Germany, Spain and
The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board, a prolific investor for years in tech, is leading the funding of the venture fund. In 2020, Valar led a round, while index led its Series C. Taxfix has raised around $330 million since it was founded.
The company's concept is very simple, played out mostly for people who do not have complicated tax profiles with different assets or other money sources in the balance. To use the app to check out your tax situation is free, and you can simply take a snapshot of your payslip, and Taxfix will do the rest for you. You can file your taxes as an individual or a couple.
Taxfix isn't a business process automation startup per se, but it takes something of the stance as one, in building its products for the consumer market.
Ott notes that the brain of a tax accountant has been hacked.
Up to now, the startup has had downloads of its app in Germany, Spain and Italy, which has resulted in over $1 billion in tax refunds for those who fill out their forms using its mobile assistant.
Taxfix doesn't disclose how many customers it has currently, although you can understand why: metrics like monthly or daily active users are hard to quantify for a product that is realistic. One reason for raising this funding is to build more products to extend that lifecycle.
Ott would not be too specific about what will come first and when, but he did say that tools for expense management would be useful for those who are self-employed. Taxfix prefers to talk about the good news stories about tax filing, and often free money owed to you.
The challenge that Taxfix was built to address was that of the original founders, who are still with the company, as well as the chairman and the CEO. I don't know if I'd use that word to describe the process of dealing with taxes, but it was a simple solution.
There is a big opportunity in the market to do that for something as mundane as taxes. The big product in the U.S. that is a competitor of sorts was started as far back as the 1980s. There is not just incumbent marketshare to take away, but new users popping up all the time.
It's not expanded outside of the U.S., which shows something about the complexity of building these products, and maybe that's why Taxfix hasn't expanded much itself.
Ott would not be drawn out on which markets the company will tackle next, except to point out that it is focusing on countries where the systems from the state are hard to use.
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