Neo.Tax raises $10m and partners with Mercury

By Edlyn Cardoza

Neo.Tax, a startup and early leader in simplifying and automating taxes for startups and small businesses, recently announced a $10 million Series A funding round.

The funding round was led by Infinity Ventures with participation from Google Ventures, Acrew Capital, and Fin Venture Capital and participation from the existing seed investors – Uncork Capital, Floodgate, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Lux Capital.

Neo.Tax is automating taxes, starting with making the R&D tax credit simple to claim for startups – and enabling FinTechs and accountants to offer this seamlessly to their customers. And what better FinTech to kick this off with than Mercury.

Mercury provides banking for startups, along with virtual & physical debit cards, API access and custom team management, and integrations with the tools startups are already using. Neo.Tax started as a Mercury customer, but it soon became clear there was much more to do together. “What truly excited us about working with Mercury is our values-alignment,” said Ibrahim, CEO of Neo.Tax.

“NeoTax has built an amazing product that has made it quick and painless to access R&D tax credits and we are excited to partner so that our customers can easily access the service.” says Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury. “We created Mercury Capital to help our customers find trusted and easy-to-access funding options for their business.”

Mercury customers can now complete their R&D Tax Credit claim in minutes, with the flexibility of a self-service solution backed by friendly white-glove support. “Neo.Tax is like having a former IRS Agent walking our customers through the process,” said Stephen Yarbrough, Chief Tax Officer at Neo.Tax.

Neo.Tax has received overwhelming gratitude from early-stage startups for modernizing the tedious and challenging application process for the R&D tax credit. “This is awesome!” said Lukas Wagner, VP Finance at Pipe. “I hope at some point you can do this for all of our taxes.” Which is precisely aligned with the Neo.Tax vision.

Neo.Tax’s approach is reflected in their founding team, where a Stanford PhD in Machine Learning (Firas Abuzaid) is automating the brain of a former IRS Agent (Stephen Yarbrough), productized by a former Intuit product manager (Ibrahim).

The Series A funding will go toward growing the product, data and engineering teams that are currently working on a series of automated tax products, in addition to the R&D Tax Credit. “We are leveraging cutting-edge technology to reduce errors, increase efficiency, and map the tax genome to optimize businesses’ taxes,” said Firas Abuzaid, CTO of Neo.Tax. “We’re overthinking taxes so that businesses don’t have to.”

Despite incredible technological advances, taxes have not changed. “It’s crazy that taxes haven’t advanced since the Rosetta Stone Age,” continued Ibrahim, “and computers are supremely advantaged at solving this ancient and archaic problem, because it’s all rules and numbers.” Neo.Tax reimagines taxes as an advantage by making taxes simple and straightforward.