Filed raises $17M to automate the drudgery of tax prep

There is a new accounting software in town, coming in with a fresh $17.2 million raise and a desire to shake things up. The company, Filed, hopes to automate the grunt work. “The tax industry is facing a genuine crisis,” Leroy Kerry, Filed’s co-founder CEO, told TechCrunch. Many CPAs are approaching retirement while a dwindling number of students are entering the field, he said, citing much-quoted research from a 2021 report on the topic from the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. “Firms simply don’t have enough people to process returns efficiently. Meanwhile, professionals are drowning in paperwork, spending nearly half their time on low-value tasks that could be automated,” he says. So he teamed up with Atul Ramachandran, now the company’s CTO, to launch Filed, which uses AI to complete the lifecycle of a tax return. “It reads documents, uses reasoning to apply each firm’s specific approach to tax strategy, and then enters that data into their exist ... Read full article.