November 22: We have raised $25 million to expand our global tax solutions. Investors in the round include Index Ventures, OMERS Ventures, FJ Labs, Moving Capital, Gautam Gupta (former COO and CFO at Opendoor and Uber), Kevin Hartz (founder at Eventbrite), Prabir Adarkar (CFO at Doordash), Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (former COO at GoCardless), Allison Barr Allen (COO at Fast) and others.
While technology is driving trade at an ever-increasing pace, it has become harder for digital-first businesses to understand and manage global tax and compliance obligations. Today, automation options are limited and manual processes remain the norm - forcing companies with cross-border transactions to rely on costly and complex solutions to manage their international tax footprint.
We are transforming how digital companies including marketplaces, digital service providers, micromobility operators, gig economy platforms and subscription-based companies stay tax compliant; converting a costly and complex process into an automatic and seamless one. We provide a plug-and-play modular platform that helps businesses determine and calculate the right amount of tax, in the right place, at the right time. This is done by providing a simple API solution that integrates into the workflow of our customers to help handle the full chain of tax reporting. Our platform verifies the tax status of the buyer and seller, calculates the correct tax to charge and creates a locally compliant invoice after a transaction takes place. Moreover, it allows for automatically reporting transactions in real-time to a country’s government where needed.
By removing manual work through automation for businesses in the internet economy, we are enabling companies such as Lime, GoStudent, Teachable, Uber and Zoom to expand their global offerings and stay tax compliant.
We were founded by three Uber alumni - Davor Tremac, Filip Sturman, Ivan Ivankovic - who experienced first hand how difficult it is to correctly calculate and report taxes to authorities throughout the world. With no suitable software solutions on the market, we decided to use their experience to automate taxes for the entire internet economy.
We currently support tax automation transactions across 100+ countries today and aim to expand this to over 140 countries by the end of the year. To help facilitate this, we have raised $25 million in funding. We plan to use the funding for growth including international expansion and hiring across all areas of the business. Though Fonoa is headquartered in Dublin, we have a remote-first approach to business with a distributed team across 14 countries and plans to hire more staff across the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America in the coming months.
In the digital world, businesses and customers transact on a global scale. Country borders are no longer a limiting factor, and technology drives global trade at an ever-increasing speed. Combined with the increased scrutiny by regulators, dealing with tax matters in a more automated and trusted way has become an ever-more pressing issue. We built a one-stop solution that handles the complexities of tax globally, allowing digital businesses to focus on growing their core business.
The Fonoa team has identified and solved a genuine problem for businesses, with a product that enables businesses to manage their tax obligations seamlessly through one API. There's a whole category of modern payment solutions which have become the norm, but the innovation and caliber of software solutions around tax have been nowhere near the same standard. Fonoa plans to change all of that.
Budding entrepreneurs can use hundreds of different platforms to scale their business and accept payments from anywhere, but when it comes to paying the right taxes across different markets, the support is non-existent. The Fonoa team has built a brilliant platform that solves this problem elegantly, providing a streamlined solution to enable businesses to operate and grow across the world.
Fonoa’s solutions have helped Zoom with expanding our global marketplace offerings by assisting with tax determination, invoicing and tax compliance.
Fonoa has been an effective partner in helping Uber to comply with the various electronic invoicing mandates. As an effective partner, Fonoa has welcomed our observations and recommendations and have digested those recommendations to implement helpful and positive changes without hesitation.
Fonoa is an API-first company that helps high-volume internet marketplaces and merchants automate taxes across the globe. Its modular product suite helps clients to reduce manual workload, increase compliance and reduce the cost of operation when transacting and scaling internationally.
Index Ventures is a London and San Francisco-based international venture capital firm that helps the most ambitious entrepreneurs turn bold ideas into global businesses. Index-backed companies that are reshaping the world around us include Datadog, Dropbox, Plaid and Slack.
OMERS is one of Canada’s largest defined benefit pension plans, with CAD$105 billion in net assets as of December 31, 2020. OMERS Ventures currently manages CAD$2 billion and has made more than 50 investments in disruptive technology companies across North America and Europe.
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