In 2023, Dave Haase was a CPA who had been running his own firm in the San Francisco Bay Area for several years when he saw a live demo of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Upon seeing the AI agent successfully file a tax return on the screen, the accountant realized: “My business is either dead in 18 months, or this is the tool that helps save it.”
“I recognized both the massive potential AI brought to the tax world, as well as the risks to firms and clients by making mistakes and hallucinations,” he told Crunchbase News.
The accounting industry has historically been slow to adopt new technologies. As of today, the majority of small to mid-sized accounting firms — which make up 90% of the market — remain stuck in a cycle of manual data entry.
Addressing both the opportunities — and risks — that came with advances in AI, Haase started building Juno, a tax prep automation startup, on the side in 2023. Rather than targeting the self-prep market, like TurboTax does, or the mega-enterprise firms that can afford $15,000-per-return software, Juno was built for the underserved SMB accounting firm.
“We continuously ‘dog fed’ the early Juno prototypes into the firm to see what worked best, what slowed things down, and to make it the most efficient tax preparation platform as possible,” Haase said.
It took about a year and a half just to build integrations. “We had to do a bunch of hacky things to be able to work with the existing tax software,” he explained, “because your typical tax software is actually around 15 to 20 years old and they don’t have public APIs.”
By 2024, Juno had launched a co-pilot. Then, in July 2025, it had a tax product. The startup began onboarding other tax firms, growing to nearly 500 customers over the past year. Last year, Haase sold his accounting firm to focus on growing Juno full-time.
Today, he’s announcing that San Francisco-based Juno has raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by Bonfire Ventures, including participation from Impression Ventures and Xfund.
AI to help humans ‘be the advisers they were trained to be’
What makes Juno different from others in the market, Haase believes, is that it operates on the premise that, at least for the foreseeable future, human tax preparers should be the ones driving the tax-return preparation process.
“A business or high-net-worth tax return requires hundreds of calculations, edge cases, deductions and more,” said Haase, who holds an MBA from Stanford University. “AI simply can’t do that with the 100% accuracy required not to get audited or charged with tax fraud.”
Describing much of the manual work that most accountants must perform to complete returns as extremely tedious, Haase acknowledges that it’s also very easy for accountants to make mistakes that could prove very costly.
“In school, if you get a 93, an A, you get all the credits,” he said. “But on a tax return, if you have a 99%, you fail, and your client could pay the price in penalties.”
In a nutshell, Juno acts as the bridge between a client’s raw documents and the accountant’s filing software. It performs tasks like pulling data from IRS forms and even unstructured documents, such as business financial statements. Overall, it automates 90% of data entry across more than 90 document types while also flagging prior-year changes and inconsistencies for human validation.
The result is that a process that typically takes a human two to three hours is shrunk down to seven to 10 minutes, Haase estimates.
“We do 95% of a tax return in minutes, leaving the accountant to handle the strategic human decisions — the parts that actually save the client money,” he said.
While he declined to reveal hard revenue figures, Haase said that in just eight months, Juno grew to mid-seven-figure annual recurring revenue.
The startup sells on a per-return basis, starting around $45, dropping to the low $30s for high-volume firms.
Perplexity‘s recent move into consumer taxes and OpenAI’s hiring of a tax director show that the bigger players are eyeing the tax market. But Haase doesn’t feel threatened.
“High-wealth individuals want assurance. If you’re paying $40,000 in taxes, you don’t want to ‘cross your fingers with a chatbot,” he said. “You want a human to talk to, someone who understands the context of your life.”
Juno isn’t trying to replace accountants, he added.
“It’s trying to rescue them from the data-entry basement so they can actually be the advisers they were trained to be,” Haase said.
The startup plans to roll out business returns soon, a move that Haase expects will significantly scale its customer base.
‘A huge, obvious pain point’
Jim Andelman, co-founder and managing director of Bonfire Ventures, said he was drawn to invest in Juno because he believes the company is going after “a huge, obvious pain point in a category that hasn’t been meaningfully modernized in a long time.”
“The workflow pain is real, the labor dynamics make the timing right, and Dave brought exactly the kind of founder-market fit you hope to see,” Andelman told Crunchbase News via email. “He lived this problem before he built the company. That always matters.”
The investor believes that tax prep is a category where trust is crucial to product success.
“If you’re going to bring AI into that workflow, it has to be transparent, auditable, and built with a human in the loop,” Andelman added. “That’s what Juno understood early, and I think that’s a big part of why the product is resonating.”
Fintech startups, particularly those that apply AI to traditionally manual or burdensome processes, have benefited from increased investment in recent quarters. Total global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $53.8 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data. That’s a more than 29% increase from 2024’s total of $41.6 billion raised.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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