Sydney, May 30: Kintsugi AI, a fintech startup simplifying tax compliance with AI-powered automation, has announced a $6 million funding round at a $40 million valuation.
The series A funding round, led by Link Ventures with participation from Venture Highway, KyberKnight, Plug and Play, and DeVC, along with notable angel investors, will drive the development of Kintsugi AI’s automated VAT solutions for Canada and Europe, supporting international sales.
Kintsugi AI helps businesses navigate complex sales tax regulations with an innovative platform that automates the end-to-end compliance process.
“We are hyper-focused on helping more than 27M ecommerce and SaaS businesses worldwide save time and money by putting their sales tax on autopilot,” said Pujun Bhatnagar, CEO and co-founder of Kintsugi AI.
“Tax complexity is only increasing, and without the right tools, manual processes will inevitably fail to scale. That’s where Kintsugi comes in.”
Founded in 2021 by Stanford graduate and former Facebook machine learning engineer Pujun Bhatnagar, ex-Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs analyst Barkin Doganay, and former Atlassian executive and MonetizeNow CTO Jeff Gibson, Kintsugi was launched in response to the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to require remote sellers to collect and remit sales tax.
This ruling highlighted the fragmented nature of sales tax laws across states, making compliance a tedious and costly task for businesses operating in multiple states.
Kintsugi AI aims to tackle this issue by automating sales tax compliance with a comprehensive platform that covers real-time nexus monitoring, AI-enabled product categorization, rooftop-level tax calculation and validation, sales tax registration, filing, exemption certificates handling, and back-tax compliance. The platform verifies each transaction through its real-time database of rules, tracks economic nexus on a real-time basis, identifies appropriate tax rates for invoicing, and provides one-click remittance and filing of sales tax returns in each applicable state.
This is powered by a large language model (LLM) trained across all sales tax regulations in 110,000 jurisdictions.
“Kintsugi addresses a real need; 48 percent of states rely on sales tax for a major source of revenue. Sales tax is defined and collected on a city, county, and state level, and performing this task manually takes hours, as does keeping track of ever-changing laws,” said Lisa Dolan, Managing Partner at Link Ventures.
“Kintsugi uses AI to make compliance fast and painless and then automates the process so companies can focus on their businesses instead of tax paperwork.”
“There are other companies that offer sales tax compliance solutions; Kintsugi’s single SaaS fee model and hands-off software management set it apart,” added Pujun Bhatnagar.
“We’re the solution that tracks, monitors, and automates sales tax compliance end-to-end, allowing businesses to get back to serving their customers. Legacy vendors have stopped innovating in this space, and many competitors are focused only on SaaS or E-commerce, missing key aspects of handling both seamlessly.”
Looking ahead, Kintsugi plans to further strengthen its platform and team to put sales tax on autopilot for every company, no matter where in the world they operate.
Media & PR: editor@dailystraits.com. Copyright 2021–Present DailyStraits.com. All rights reserved.