More often than not, managing tax returns is a confusing and grueling process. Tax returns this year, in particular, were troublesome as 50 percent of taxpayers expected their refunds to be smaller than normal due to the finances they received through pandemic aid programs.
Even before Covid-19 aid was in the picture, most taxpayers struggled to estimate what their returns would look like each year. To combat disinformation and better aid consumers, NYC-based April offers an artificial intelligence-backed tax filing platform and it just raised funds to further its product.
On Wednesday, the startup raked in $30 million in its Series A funding round led by Treasury with participation from Atento Capital, Euclidean Capital, Nyca Partners, QED and Team8.
April’s co-founders Daniel Marcous, the former CTO of navigation app Waze, and Ben Borodach, a former Deloitte fintech strategist, hold impressive backgrounds that pose their star power in the tech industry. With April, the duo is on a mission to create a more equal and accessible tax process through its tax platform which can be embedded across fintech apps.
“April’s main goal is to empower the taxpayer,” Borodach said in a statement. “By embedding tax into the banking and financial apps that folks are already using, we can drastically reduce the tension of tax filing, helping American taxpayers avoid overpayments and attain a better grasp on their overall financial picture with the full power of the tax code at their disposal.”
Since launching in 2022, April has helped customers cut down the time it takes to fill out their tax information to an average of 15 minutes, according to the company. The April tax engine works with other fintech platforms to perform tax calculations throughout the year based on emerging data. By partnering with other fintech platforms, April can help fill out users’ information needed for tax filing, which in return, saves them time and money, according to the company.
With its new capital, April is investing in its research and development to scale its platform’s operational capacity for the next tax season. Additional funds will go toward hiring for its product and engineering teams.
