Our Investment in Ceretax - Putting Tax Calculation on Autopilot

At Leaders Fund, we believe that investing in companies solving mission critical business problems with innovative technology, large addressable markets, and differential value for their customers is the best way to create value.  For complex enterprises, calculating their sales and use tax obligations has become increasingly complex as myriad city, county, state, and federal rules have multiplied.  The increasing gap between customer needs and current solutions have created a significant market opportunity. That’s why we’re excited to share that we have led a $10 million seed financing in CereTax, an intelligent sales tax automation platform built to support the most complex business requirements.  

Mike Sanders and Brent Reeves are no strangers to the tax space. Sanders sold his first company, Tax Partners, to Thomson Reuters in 2005. He then teamed up with Reeves to launch SureTax, a tax software platform acquired by Wolters Kluwer in 2015. After successfully building and exiting two previous tax software companies, co-founders Sanders and Reeves realized that existing sales tax automation solutions designed for complex industries and large enterprises had become antiquated and were not meeting customer needs. They found that customers faced slow performance, frequent downtime, expensive customizations, and costly maintenance.  This resulted in poor end customer experience, arduous audits, and limited flexibility.

Over the past few years, several venture backed SaaS Tax solutions have emerged, however, they are focused on serving SMB’s, and have not solved the problems that enterprises face when it comes to tax calculation and automation. CereTax’s multi-vertical, data-rich, geospatial-enhanced offering is meeting the needs of complex enterprises with a set of capabilities, performance, and flexibility that are unrivalled.

In the US, larger businesses must account for 11,000+ sales tax jurisdictions across cities, counties, and states and how they apply to thousands of products being bought and sold. These rules change frequently, making real time calculations and compliance extremely challenging. Getting these calculations wrong is costly and can lead to millions-of-dollars of liability for larger businesses.

In addition to the experienced team and innovative product offering, CereTax has built a strong distribution network, including partnerships with industry leading tax practices such as KPMG.  Thanks to these partnerships and robust product integrations, CereTax counts Fortune 500 companies amongst its clients.

The CereTax team has made huge strides since its founding 18 months ago, hiring a team of over 30 people and building out its entire geospatial technology from scratch.  Although it’s still early, we’re proud of what CereTax has accomplished so far. Our investment philosophy aligns well with the CereTax vision – build a long-term, sustainable enterprise solving a real business problem while providing significant end-user value. We’re looking forward to working with the team as they continue to build a world-class, global, multi-vertical tax automation solution.  

To learn more about how CereTax helps companies simplify sales tax complexity, visit ceretax.com

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