February 3, 2026
TAXNOVA ENTERS a16z SPEEDRUN TO SOLVE R&D TAX CREDITS
Today, we're excited to announce that Taxnova is launching publicly to help tech companies maximize their R&D tax credits with AI.
We've raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from a16z speedrun, s16vc, Karaoke Club, and 20 operators from Revolut, Miro, and other tech companies.
We have now entered the a16z speedrun accelerator, concluded a successful partnership pilot with a top-5 R&D tax advisory firm, and helped dozens of early customers.
Billions Left on the Table
R&D tax credits are government incentives designed to make innovation more affordable by lowering tax bills or even providing cash reimbursements for qualifying work. The numbers are staggering:
UK companies claimed £7.6 billion in R&D tax relief in 2023-24
The US federal government issues over $32 billion annually, and 30+ states have their own programs
Yet most tech companies struggle to claim these credits effectively. The process requires engineering teams to reconstruct months of work from memory while they're trying to ship product. Finance leaders are flying blind until months after the accounting year ends. And with tax authorities increasing audit scrutiny, the risk of getting it wrong has never been higher.
We found that 75% of the time is lost on data collection alone.
How Taxnova Works
Taxnova connects directly to the tools your engineers already use—GitHub, Jira, Linear, Slack, and Notion—to automatically extract evidence of qualifying R&D work. Our platform:
Identifies qualifying projects from your existing workflows
Generates technical narratives that explain your innovation
Calculates eligible costs automatically
Produces audit-ready documentation with complete trails linking claims to source evidence
All without pulling engineers away from shipping.
Our customers already report enormous time savings. Director of Research from causaLens, a London-based AI deep tech company said, "That's already closing in on 80% of our work".
We work alongside your existing tax advisors rather than replacing them. And for multi-hub companies, we automatically split data by region and maintain consistency across international operations in the UK, US, and other jurisdictions.
How It Started
When I was working at Gett, our CFO asked me to help apply for R&D tax credits. It seemed straightforward enough until I talked to the vendor.
They handed me a spreadsheet and asked me to fill it with our R&D projects. But didn't even know what qualified as an R&D project. What were the criteria? Which activities counted?
So I did what any engineer would do: I figured it out myself. I studied the rules, digged through our Slack and Jira, talked to colleagues across teams, and gathered tons of documents. It was painful, time-consuming, and felt like it was pulling me away from my actual product work.
That experience stuck with me. I kept thinking there had to be a better way. With my background in finance, consulting, and tech management, I started telling everyone I was working on solving R&D tax credits. What I thought would be a two-week exploration turned into something much bigger. I realized I was completely energized by this problem. I wanted to work on it.
That's how Taxnova was born. During our beta, we have helped dozens of companies apply for and secure tax credits.
What's Next
We're working with our first customers to turn what used to take months into weeks, and we're just getting started. If you're a tech company leaving R&D credits on the table because the process is too painful, we'd love to talk.
Taxnova is entering the a16z speedrun accelerator program. We're hiring for a founding engineer role — reach out if you're interested in joining us.