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Exclusive: Juno, CPA-Founded Startup That Aims To Make Tax Returns Less Painful With AI, Raises $12M

Judy Rider — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:00:41 +0000

In 2023, 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 ’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 С��Ƶɫ��ҳ�� 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 , a tax prep automation startup, on the side in 2023. Rather than targeting the self-prep market, like does, or the mega-enterprise firms that can afford $15,000-per-return software, Juno was built for the underserved SMB accounting firm.

Dave Haase, founder of Juno. (Courtesy photo)

“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 Diego-based Juno has raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by , including participation from and .

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 . “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.

‘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’

, 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 С��Ƶɫ��ҳ�� 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 С��Ƶɫ��ҳ�� . That’s a more than 29% increase from 2024’s total of $41.6 billion raised.

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Post Roe v. Wade Ruling, Will We See More Startups Offering Abortion Pills?

Sophia Kunthara — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 18:48:29 +0000

Online pharmacies and telehealth saw a boom in recent years, thanks to the pandemic.��

But now, additional eyes are on these startups as federal protections for the right to an abortion were struck down this summer in a ��ܱ��Բ�.��

The court’s decision in June reversed the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which gave pregnant women the right to an abortion until fetal viability, or when the fetus could survive outside the womb. By overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court made it so that states could ban or restrict abortions.��

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How this will or won’t impact abortion pill providers continues to be muddy regulatory waters. In the meantime, existing digital health companies could expand their offerings to include abortion pills.

Medication-based abortion

Medication-based abortion provides an option for women early in their pregnancy. The combination of the pills mifepristone and misoprostol was approved by the in 2000 to terminate a pregnancy up to 11 weeks, , a research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive rights.��

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the requirement that women needed to visit a provider at a hospital or clinic to be prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol .

The change in rules led to an uptick in medication-based abortions, which now account for half the abortions in the United States, per the Guttmacher Institute. That’s up from more than one-third in 2017.��

Since the change in rules, at least two startups focused on providing medication abortions received funding, according to С��Ƶɫ��ҳ�� data. Those include New York-based and San Rafael, California-based .��

Hey Jane serves patients in California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Washington, while Choix serves women in California, Illinois, New Mexico and Colorado.

Choix has raised $1 million in funding from , while Hey Jane has raised $3.6 million from investors including and , per С��Ƶɫ��ҳ��.

Both companies provide virtual or text-based consults with patients who are early in their pregnancy and located in eligible states before shipping abortion pills, all for a flat fee.��

Choix saw a 600% increase in web traffic on the day the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was announced, according to CEO Cindy Adam. The company also experienced a 50% increase in the number of patients seeking care since the ruling, and it anticipates that increase to continue as people turn to medication abortion.

“Telemedicine clinics like Choix can also alleviate capacity issues, helping local clinics to reserve in-person visits for patients who require or prefer in-person care or are traveling from out of state,” Adam wrote in an email.

The company’s goal is to expand to every state where it can legally provide abortion medication by the end of next year, given how in flux the current situation is.

Medication abortion is currently in a bit of a gray legal area. While states now can ban abortions, mifepristone is approved by the FDA. On June 24, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that, ”states may not ban Mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.”

Will more startups offer abortion pills?

While there are only two venture-backed startups in the С��Ƶɫ��ҳ�� database focused on providing the abortion pill, that doesn’t mean other health care startups aren’t looking to expand their services in light of the Roe v. Wade ruling.

, a partner at venture capital firm , who invests in the future of health, noted that the number of companies focused solely on providing abortion pills doesn’t provide the full picture of how startups are responding.��

Some existing digital health companies are working toward offering the abortion pill and expanding their women’s health services as well, said Shakir.

Lux portfolio company , for example, said in November that it would begin offering medical abortion in California, Shakir noted.

And Adam of Choix said she is aware of other online pharmacies working to become certified to dispense mifepristone.��

Online pharmacies grew more popular during the pandemic, as more people looked to have their medications shipped directly to them. But currently, there are only two online pharmacies licensed to distribute the abortion pill, including venture-backed

Shakir noted that it’s important for existing health care companies to expand services, given how difficult it is to start and roll out a company in a field as highly regulated as health care.

“I do think that it’s critical, because, especially if you’re starting a new company, it’s not easy to start and scale across states,” Shakir said. “So is making sure existing companies and companies focusing on other aspects of health care are stepping up to the plate.”

Women’s health has historically been dismissed as niche—something that Shakir said doesn’t make sense, considering women consist of half the population and make up around 80% of the dollars and decisions in health care.

Digital health is a relatively nascent space, though it’s gaining interest from investors as it matures, Shakir said.

“Human health is ‘recession proof’ in that we will continue to get sick and give birth and die and have significant health care needs,” Shakir said. “And the major stakeholders in this industry, going beyond patients, the pharma companies, the providers, the payers … are under pressure to propel pandemic digital progress and make it permanent.”