A London-based startup that automates R&D tax credits for tech companies has emerged out of stealth, with $1m in pre-seed funding, including backing from Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z’s) accelerator.
TaxNova has raised funding from a16z’s accelerator, a16z speedrun, early-stage angel fund, s16vc, accelerator Karaoke Club, and more than 20 CTO and CFO operators and investors from Revolut, digital whiteboard creater Miro, and other tech firms.
TaxNova has also entered into a16z’s accelerator programme.
R&D tax credits are government incentives that lower a company’s tax bill. Companies in the UK claimed £7.6 billion in R&D tax relief in 2023-24, figures reveal.
TaxNova states the existing process for claiming R&D tax credits is long-winded, stateing companies must gather documented qualified research expenses and supporting records to apply, which often requires engineering teams to reconstruct months of work from memory.
It states that most rely on inefficient processes, running an increasing risk of audit from tax authorities and wasting engineering time. It also states that tech companies are missing out on billions of pounds of unclaimed tax credits.
TaxNova states its solution can speed up the claims process from months to weeks.
Its solution is to connect directly to the tools engineers already utilize, including GitHub, Jira, Linear, Slack, and Notion, to automatically pull out the qualifying R&D work.
The platform leverages AI to identify projects, calculate eligible costs, and produce audit-ready documentation without pulling engineers away from shipping.
It states that its tech creates an audit trail linking every claim back to source documentation. It works alongside existing tax advisers rather than replacing them and has concluded a partnership pilot with a top-5 R&D tax advisory firm, it states.
The startup was founded by George Nichkov, CEO, a former consultant, and computer engineer, Marya Malykh, CTO.
Nichkov declared: “TaxNova AI-powered platform extracts data from your existing systems to maximise R&D tax claims without wasting engineers’ time. 75 per cent of time is lost on data collection and we’re solving this bottleneck.”
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