Juno and AI: $12 Million to Transform Taxation

In 2023, Dave Haase, an accountant from the San Francisco Bay Area, faced a startling reality during a demonstration of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Watching the AI agent successfully fill out a tax return, Haase realized that his business was at a turning point: “My business is either dead in 18 months, or this tool is going to help it survive.” This realization led him to found Juno, a startup dedicated to automating tax preparation.

The accounting industry, often slow to adopt new technologies, is dominated by small to medium-sized firms that represent 90% of the market. These firms are still largely reliant on manual data entry. Juno aims to change that by specifically targeting these firms, rather than competing with giants like TurboTax or offering expensive solutions at $15,000 per return.

To address the opportunities and risks associated with advancements in AI, Haase began building Juno in 2023. Rather than targeting the self-preparation market, Juno was designed for underserved small and medium-sized accounting firms. “We continuously integrated early prototypes of Juno into the firm to see what worked best, what slowed things down, and to make it the most efficient tax preparation platform possible,” Haase stated.

It took about a year and a half just to establish the integrations. “We had to do several makeshift things to be able to work with existing tax software,” he explained, “because your typical tax software is actually 15 to 20 years old and doesn’t have public APIs.”

By 2024, Juno had launched a co-pilot. Then, in July 2025, it had a tax product. The startup began integrating other tax firms, reaching nearly 500 clients over the past year. Last year, Haase sold his accounting firm to focus on growing Juno full-time.

Today, he announces that Juno, based in San Francisco, has raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Impression Ventures and Xfund.

What sets Juno apart from other market players, according to Haase, is that it operates on the principle that, at least for the foreseeable future, human tax preparers should be the ones leading the tax return preparation process. “A tax return for a business or a high-net-worth individual requires hundreds of calculations, special cases, deductions, and more,” said Haase, who holds an MBA from Stanford University. “AI simply cannot do it with the 100% accuracy required to avoid being audited or accused of tax fraud.”

Describing much of the manual work that most accountants must perform to complete returns as extremely tedious, Haase acknowledges that it is 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 99%, you fail, and your client could pay the price in penalties.”

In summary, Juno acts as a bridge between a client's raw documents and the accountant's filing software. It performs tasks such as extracting data from IRS forms and even unstructured documents, such as corporate financial statements. Overall, it automates 90% of data entry across more than 90 types of documents, while flagging changes and inconsistencies compared to the previous year for human validation.

The result is that a process that typically takes two to three hours for a human is reduced to seven to ten minutes, estimates Haase. “We do 95% of a tax return in a few minutes, leaving the accountant to handle the strategic human decisions—the parts that actually save money for the client,” he said.

Although he declined to disclose specific revenue figures, Haase stated that in just eight months, Juno had achieved a seven-figure annual recurring revenue. The startup charges on a per-return basis, starting around $45, dropping to the $30 range for high-volume firms.

The recent move by Perplexity into consumer taxes and OpenAI's hiring of a tax director shows that major players are interested in the tax market. But Haase does not feel threatened. “High-net-worth 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 is not trying to replace accountants, he added. “It’s trying to get them out of the basement of data entry so they can actually be the advisors they were trained to be,” Haase said. The startup plans to soon launch business returns, a move that Haase expects will significantly expand its client base.

Jim Andelman, co-founder and managing partner of Bonfire Ventures, stated that he was drawn to invest in Juno because he believes the company is addressing “a huge and obvious pain point in a category that hasn’t been significantly modernized for a long time.”

“The pain related to workflow is real, the work dynamic makes this the right moment, and Dave has brought exactly the type of founder-market fit that you hope to see,” Andelman told Crunchbase News via email. “He experienced this problem before starting the company. That always matters.”

The investor believes that tax preparation is a category where trust is crucial for product success. “If you’re going to introduce AI into this workflow, it has to be transparent, auditable, and built with a human in the loop,” Andelman added. “That’s what Juno understood early on, and I think that’s a big part of why the product resonates.”

Fintech startups, particularly those applying AI to traditionally manual or cumbersome processes, have seen increased investment in recent quarters. Global funding for venture capital-backed fintech startups reached $53.8 billion in 2025, according to Crunchbase data. This is an increase of over 29% compared to the total of $41.6 billion raised in 2024.