Column Tax Raises $5.1 Million to Accelerate Product Development

By Justin Johnson.
Updated Nov 23, 2021

SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) November 23, 2021 - Column Tax, the personal income tax software company, has announced $5.1 million in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from South Park Commons, Core Innovation Capital, and Operator Partners. Column Tax will use the funds to expand adoption of its Tax Refund Unlock and Tax Filing products.

Giving Americans Year-Round Access to Tax Refunds Column Tax provides an API that enables mobile banking and fintech companies to offer powerful tax products to their account holders. By unlocking year-round access to tax refunds and advice, Column Tax and its partners, including Atomic, are enabling consumers to optimize tax returns in a fundamentally new way.

Column Tax is also announcing its first commercial product, Tax Refund Unlock, enabling all Americans to get advance access to their tax refunds in monthly payments, as well as file their taxes with just a few clicks.

Taxes are a stressful but critical part of the financial year for the 122 million Americans that receive a refund, said Gavin Nachbar, co-founder and CEO of Column Tax. By helping every American access their refunds year-round, people can save, invest, pay off debt, and meet ongoing obligations throughout the year, all with greater peace of mind.

In partnership with Klover, the free financial services platform, users can opt in to immediately unlock access to their future refunds through the Klover app. By optimizing tax withholdings, Klover users will receive more of their earnings in each paycheck, reducing the need for loans or credit cards, and stop overpaying in taxes.

Americans should be able to access their money when they need to. Increasing your paycheck by a couple hundred dollars can be life changing for millions of people, said Brian Mandelbaum, CEO of Klover. At Klover, we want to level the playing field by helping consumers get access to fair financial services. We already offer free access to your paycheck, real-time price comparisons, money management and saving tools, and a lot more. This is the next logical step in doing right by our consumers.

Every year, tax payers receive more than $350 billion of their own money back in the form of a tax refund. That would be the thirteenth largest bank by consolidated assets, untouched by tax payers who may need that money in a pinch, said Lindsay Davis, Head of Markets at Atomic. This unique solution is yet another way our payroll connectivity is unlocking the power of the paycheck.

A New Approach to Tax Filing In the upcoming tax season, Column Tax is rolling out a modern income tax filing product to complement its year-round platform. With Tax Filing, Column Tax enables partners to seamlessly offer an embedded income tax filing product to end users, a major step forward for the filing experience. By connecting directly with financial accounts, Column Tax makes it possible to significantly increase accuracy and reduce the amount of money and time (an estimated seven billion hours annually) spent preparing tax returns.

Figuring out and meeting income tax obligations is an experience that 140 million Americans face each year, said Kevin Zhang, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. With Column Tax, developers can build new experiences powered by trusted personal tax calculations. By embedding with the financial services that we interact with throughout the year, Column Tax has the most compelling vision weve seen for helping millions of Americans avoid excessive withholding and year-end surprises, and stay continuously up-to-date throughout the tax year.

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About Column Tax Column Tax (https://www.columntax.com) is a personal income tax software company. The companys APIs enable mobile banks and fintech companies to offer powerful tax products to their account holders and end users. Column Tax is backed by investors including Bain Capital Ventures, South Park Commons, Core Innovation Capital, and Operator Partners.

About Klover Klover's mission is to give access to modern financial services to consumers by leveraging their most valuable asset: their data. Using Klover's platform, millions of consumers can access their earned wages in seconds with no interest, no credit check and no hidden fees. Unlike many financial institutions that rely heavily on consumer fees, Klover's business model revolves around leveraging consumer-permissioned data and insights in concert with trusted partners. Klover was founded in 2019 and is based in Chicago. For more information, visit http://www.joinklover.com.

About Atomic Atomic is the market leading provider of payroll APIs, trusted by 12 of the largest fintech firms, including digital-first neobanks, alternative lenders, and digital brokerages. Atomic's payroll integrations provide the infrastructure to connect consumers to their financial data, automate setting up and updating direct deposits, and tax withholdings.

Atomic simplifies complicated payroll integrations with a single API that covers over 450 unique payroll connections, including incumbent payroll providers, bespoke enterprise solutions, modern HR tech providers, gig-economy platforms and government systems, Atomic's payroll APIs cover 75% of the U.S. workforce with a combined reach of 120 million workers. Atomic has raised $38.6 million from investors, including Core Innovation Capital, Portag3, and Greylock.

For more insight on the intersection of fintech and payroll, you can subscribe to Atomic's Intelligence newsletter.

About Bain Capital Ventures Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. BCV invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from SaaS, infrastructure software and security to fintech and healthcare to commerce and consumer tech. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 365 companies, including Attentive, Digital Currency Group, DocuSign, Flywire, Jet.com, LinkedIn, Redis Labs, Rent the Runway, SendGrid, and SurveyMonkey. BCV has $9.2 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn and Twitter.