SAN DIEGO, CA — Juno, the tax prep automation platform built by CPAs for tax professionals, today announced $12 million in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures, along with Impression Ventures and X Fund. Juno significantly automates the preparation, review, and advisory of tax returns, helping CPAs spend 50% less time per return, while always keeping a human in the loop.
Tax Firms’ Problem: No Safe Way to Deploy AI for Tax Returns
Preparing tax returns remains a grueling bottleneck for firms, requiring practitioners to spend hours manually entering thousands of data points. While AI offers a potential escape from this grunt work, many AI platforms are black boxes that lack transparency, making it impossible for a CPA to verify the logic behind a specific calculation. Entrusting total control to these opaque systems is a dangerous gamble, as even a single mistake can lead to IRS audits, costly lawsuits, and the potential loss of a professional license. This creates a painful tradeoff: firms are drowning in repetitive data entry, yet they cannot risk the liability of automated systems that don’t allow for a “human in the loop” to validate key decisions.
“Busy season used to mean long days just getting through the prep work,” said Joel Yaeger, a Juno customer, CPA, Founder & CEO of CMPD Wealth Advisory & Tax. “With Juno handling the busywork, our team can now do in a day what used to take a week. It lets us focus on what we are really in this profession for: applying our judgment and helping clients navigate the decisions that matter most.”
“Juno is an actual lifesaver, it makes tax season feel manageable,” said Molly Sutz, a CFP at BlueSky Wealth Advisors. “I used to do 2-3 returns a day manually, but I’ve since been able to double or triple that.”
Juno’s Solution: Transparent Tax Automation
Juno breaks this cycle by offering a “clear box” automation platform designed specifically for the high-stakes world of tax compliance. Instead of forcing practitioners to trust an opaque algorithm, Juno’s interface always keeps a human in the loop by providing source-to-return traceability, allowing CPAs to see exactly where every data point originated with side-by-side windows. By automating 90% of data entry across 92+ document types while flagging prior-year changes and inconsistencies for human validation, Juno cuts prep time by 50% without stripping the professional of their final authority. The result is a seamless, real-time workflow that turns grunt work into a high-speed review process, ensuring that every return is both highly efficient and audit-ready.
Key features include:
- Real-Time Processing: No batching or overnight waiting; data is processed instantly.
- Source-to-Return Traceability: Every number is traceable from the source document to the specific tax field, with side-by-side comparisons and bounding boxes for easy validation.
- Deep Integrations: Juno can extract data from 92+ document types and integrates with nearly every tax software as well as other tools like TaxDome and K1x.
- Automatic Error Flagging: The system identifies prior-year changes and source-to-return inconsistencies, allowing reviewers to focus only on exceptions.
“The accounting industry is wasting our best minds on manual data entry,” said David Haase, Founder and CEO of Juno. “We didn’t just build Juno to save time, we built it to allow accountants to move from being data processors to the high-value advisors their clients actually need.”
Founded by Tax Pros with Decades of Experience
Juno was founded by David Haase, who previously built Golden State Accounting into a regional powerhouse that handled tax returns for thousands of clients. He created Juno to automate many of the inefficiencies he discovered over a decade, and spent more than a year rapidly iterating Juno within his own practice. To scale Juno across the industry, he assembled a team of leading AI, accounting, and tax experts.
“We back founders who have lived the problem they are solving, and David is the personification of that,” said Jim Andelman, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Bonfire Ventures. “Having built a multi-million dollar accounting practice from the ground, he knew exactly where the bottlenecks were, how CPAs would use this, and the level of accountability needed for this high stakes work.”
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