- Investments
- 21 May 2025
- 3 min read
- Words: Northzone
Our investment in Filed: disrupting the tax preparation market
Photo: Co-founders Atul Ramachadran, Leroy Kerry
There’s a perfect storm brewing in the global tax industry, and it’s been growing in strength over the past decade: a staggering 75% of active CPAs are approaching retirement, student enrollment in accounting programs has fallen drastically, which translates into 9 out of 10 tax firms being unable to fulfill hiring needs. At the same time, demand for professional tax services is growing, due to a plethora of macro factors, including rising complexity from cross-border trade and an increase in small businesses. This is fueling the perfect storm that is now creating an existential threat for many of the over 50k registered CPA firms in the US.
It was against this backdrop that we met the Filed team.
Filed is building the first truly scalable infrastructure for the modern tax firm – AI-native, domain-specific, and scalable from day one. Filed’s platform doesn’t just automate manual and repetitive tasks; it elevates the capacity of every tax professional without overhauling existing workflows, ensuring professionals can spend their time delivering value to their customers where it matters most.
Today, we’re proud to announce our investment in Filed, leading their $17.2m round alongside Day One Ventures, J Ventures, Neo, Raine, and Greens Ventures.
Building the platform, not the point solution
Whilst we have seen no shortage of AI tools automating back-office tasks. Filed’s insight was clear: the most pressing unsolved challenge facing tax professionals today is the lack of systems and tooling to streamline tax filing preparation. Working closely alongside seasoned tax professionals, Filed’s AI has been developed to mirror firm-specific workflows, integrating directly into existing industry software, and super-powering preparer capacity. Firms working with Filed are already processing 3-4x more returns without amending their headcount, transforming 7-day turnaround times into overnight results. Critically, Filed is able to achieve this with a deterministic, auditable, and IRS-compliant architecture, earning trust in a field where errors have real consequences.
Early customers like JCG Tax, Smith CPA and KBS Tax describe the impact as transformational, not incremental. The firm’s platform helps manage both federal and multi-state returns, proactively flags anomalies, and escalates ambiguous cases for review – enabling scale without sacrificing accuracy.
Behind Filed is a team that combines deep fintech and enterprise engineering experience with an intimate understanding of operational complexity. The co-founders, Leroy Kerry and Atul Ramachadran – fintech veteran from Juni and former engineering leader from PayPal and McKinsey – have assembled a standout team with backgrounds from Spotify, Visa, KPMG, and Deloitte.
“The tax sector has been waiting for its AI moment, but most solutions miss the mark by forcing firms to choose between innovation and stability,” adds our partner Jessica Schultz, “Filed is the first platform we’ve seen that delivers immediate ROI without disrupting critical workflows. While others talk about AI potential, Filed is already multiplying capacity for firms caught in the talent squeeze – exactly what the market needs right now.”
We’re excited to welcome Leroy, Atul and the Filed team to the portfolio as they build the AI infrastructure that will carry the tax profession into the future.