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 demonstration OpenAIChatGPT. After seeing the AI agent successfully file his tax return on screen, the accountant realized, “Either my company will be dead in 18 months, or this is the tool that will help save it.”
“I realized both the enormous potential that AI has brought to the tax world and the risks to businesses and customers of making mistakes and hallucinations,” he told Crunchbase News.
In the past, the accounting industry was slow to adopt recent technologies. Today, most small and medium-sized accounting firms – which make up 90% of the market – are stuck in a manual data entry cycle.
Considering each the opportunities and threats that advances in artificial intelligence presented, Haase began building Junotax preparation automation startup on the side in 2023. Instead of focusing on the do-it-yourself preparation market like TurboTax does, or mega-enterprises that can afford software value $15,000 a return, Juno was built for the underserved SMB accounting firm.
“We continually fed the company early prototypes of Juno to see what worked best, what slowed it down, and to make it the most efficient tax preparation platform possible,” Haase said.
Just building the integration took about a yr and a half. “We had to do a lot of complicated things to be able to work with existing tax software,” he explained, “because typical tax software is actually about 15-20 years old and has no public APIs.”
By 2024, Juno will have launched a second pilot. Then in July 2025 it had a tax product. The startup began onboarding other tax firms, and over the past yr it has grown to nearly 500 customers. Last yr, Haase sold his accounting firm to focus on growing Juno full-time.
Today pronounces that San Diego-based Juno has raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by Campfire activitiesincluding participation from Impression projects AND Xfund.
Artificial intelligence will help people ‘be the advisors they were trained to be’
Haase believes what sets Juno apart from others on the market is that it operates on the premise that, at least for the foreseeable future, tax preparers ought to be driving the tax preparation process.
“A tax return for a business or high-net-worth estate requires hundreds of calculations, extreme cases, deductions and more,” said Haase, who holds an MBA from the U. Stanford University. “AI simply cannot do this with the 100% accuracy required to avoid being audited or charged with tax fraud.”
Describing the significant amount of manual work that most accountants have to do to prepare their accounts as extremely tedious, Haase acknowledges that accountants can very easily make mistakes that can prove very costly.
“In school, if you get 93 points, or an A, you get all the points,” he said. “But if you get 99% on your tax return, you fail, and your client may end up paying the price in penalties.”
In short, Juno acts as a bridge between a client’s raw documents and an accountant’s filing software. It performs tasks similar to retrieving data from IRS forms and even unstructured documents similar to company financial statements. Overall, it automates 90% of knowledge entry in over 90 document types, while flagging changes and inconsistencies from the previous yr for manual review.
As a result, a process that normally takes a person two to three hours is reduced to seven to ten minutes, Haase estimates.
“We complete 95% of the tax return in minutes, leaving the accountant to make the strategic human decisions – the parts that actually save the client money,” he said.
While he declined to reveal hard revenue numbers, Haase said that in just eight months, Juno has averaged seven figures in annual recurring revenue.
The startup sells on a refund basis, starting at around $45 and dropping to the low $30s for high-volume corporations.
EmbarrassmentThe company’s recent move to consumer taxes and OpenAI’s hiring of a tax director show that major players are keeping an eye on the tax market. But Haase doesn’t feel threatened.
“Wealthy people want certainty. If you’re paying $40,000 in taxes, you don’t want to be ‘crossing your fingers for a chatbot,'” he said. “You want to talk to a person who understands the context of your life.”
He added that Juno is not trying to replace accountants.
“He’s trying to rescue them from the data entry basement so they can actually be the advisors they were trained to be,” Haase said.
The startup plans to introduce business returns soon, which Haase believes will significantly expand its customer base.
“A huge, obvious problem.”
Jim Andelmanco-founder and managing director of Bonfire Ventures, said he was interested in investing in Juno because he believes the company has a “huge, obvious problem in a category that hasn’t seen significant modernization for a long time.”
“The workflow issues are real, the work dynamics make the timing right, and Dave has delivered exactly the founder market fit you hope to see,” Andelman told Crunchbase News by email. “He experienced this problem before he started the company. It always matters.”
The investor believes that tax preparation is a category where trust is crucial to the success of the product.
“If you’re going to incorporate AI into that workflow, it has to be transparent, controllable and human-driven,” Andelman added. “That’s what Juno understood early on, and I think that’s a big part of why the product does so well.”
Fintech startups, especially those that use AI in traditionally manual or cumbersome processes, have benefited from increased investment in recent quarters. Total global funding for VC-backed fintech startups was $53.8 billion in 2025, according to Crunchbase data. This is an increase of greater than 29% compared to the total amount of $41.6 billion raised in 2024.