“But in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”*. And being a US and UK citizen, I get the added benefit of filing two sets of taxes each year.

My US experience: Open my Turbotax account online, whizz through the onboarding and document collection, make the annual updates, pay $120 and it’s done.

My UK experience. Email my accountant and wait a couple of days. Receive a document request list over email, offer up a Sunday to the tax gods and begin the document collection. Once these are sent in, there will invariably be a week or two of back and forth before the filing is complete. Pay my £500 fee and (in an exhaustive tone) we are done. Credit to TaxScouts for kindly providing some head knocking space (see image) during last year’s peak tax season.

Clearly something is broken. As it turns out these problems are consistent across the 200m taxpayers in Europe each year. To give context, the US market – which is home to numerous multi-billion dollar tax companies – comprises roughly 150m tax filings each year.

Enter TaxScouts, or more specifically Tram, Dan and Kaupo. Between them they have led product, engineering and design at hypergrowth companies such as Transferwise, MarketFinance, Intuit UK and Skype. You don’t have to look hard to see their superpowers in play. TaxScouts has nearly 1000 Trustpilot reviews with over 91% of them being 5* and one of the highest consumer NPS scores we’ve seen. All of this we hope will continue to correlate into an incredibly sticky product in an industry that has historically demonstrated high customer retention.

Having been through the Transferwise and Skype journey you can imagine that European expansion was in the front of Tram’s (co-founder and CEO) mind and we are excited to provide Series A funding to support this rollout.

We are delighted to have the opportunity to lead the £5m Series A investment into TaxScouts, alongside a group of familiar faces including Seedcamp, Speedinvest and Finch Capital as we support the team in the next phase of growth. What does success look like for Tram? He puts it simply; “Doing your taxes should be as easy as buying a pair of socks on ASOS.” Goodluck to Tram, Dan, Kaupo and the team as you set about your mission of creating one-click tax returns.

Check them out (www.taxscouts.com) and see how easy it really is!

*Opening quote from Benjamin Franklin (1789)