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