April 11, 2026
We’re excited to share that Bonfire led Juno’s $12 million seed round, with participation from Impression Ventures and Xfund. You can read the coverage in Crunchbase here.
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Tax preparation is one of the last great unreformed workflows in professional services. The pain is obvious, the labor shortage is structural, and the ROI on getting it right is immediate. Juno is building the software that finally fixes it, automating 50% or more of the work of preparing a return, in a category still dominated by manual workflows and decades-old systems.
We've been waiting for a team that actually understood this category well enough to go after it. Juno is that team.
Accounting and tax prep firms have been running on aging software and shrinking talent pools for years. The seasonal demand spikes make both problems worse. And while plenty of software companies have tried to modernize the category, most have only gone so far, because the hard part of tax work isn't just rules and math. It's rules and math applied under pressure, with real stakes, where interpretation and judgment still matter enormously.
That's where generative AI changes the equation.
Not by replacing the accountant, but by absorbing the parts of the job that have always been too manual, too error-prone, and too slow.
The moment you put AI into a high-stakes professional workflow, trust becomes the product. Juno understands this. The system is built around a human-in-the-loop architecture. It does the work, assigns confidence scores to every action, and makes it immediately clear what can be trusted, what needs review, and where a human needs to step in. It knows what it knows. More importantly, it knows what it doesn't.
That's not a feature. That's the entire reason a CPA would adopt this. If they get it wrong they risk losing their license.
CEO Dave Haase didn’t come to tax prep as an outsider with a thesis. He took over his mother’s tax business and ran it for a decade, and used software and automation to scale long before this AI moment arrived. When the technology finally caught up to the problem, he already knew exactly what needed to be built and what it would take for firms like his to trust it. That kind of founder-market fit is hard to fake.
Equally important, this isn’t founder-market fit concentrated in one person.
Dave built Juno alongside co-founders CTO Sunny Shah and Head of AI Jack Flitcroft. And the strength of the team extends beyond the founding trio. Several members of Juno’s executive team previously helped scale companies from zero to $100 million. That says a lot about the caliber of team Dave is building. We sat in on live sales calls, and the way every member of this team handled detailed workflow questions and customer objections made it clear they know their buyer cold.
During diligence, inbound demand was running so hot that Juno had to abandon one-on-one demos in favor of group webinars just to keep up.
On more than one call, a prospect stopped the demo midway and said: you can stop. How do we get started?
From August of last year to the end of the year, ARR grew 19x. That's not traction, that's pull, and it's showing up at every level of the market, including active engagement with one of the top ten tax firms in the nation.
With Juno, tax professionals get to spend less time typing numbers from W-2s and K-1s into fields on a screen, and more time doing what they actually trained for: advising clients and helping them make better decisions to save money.
But that shift isn't without friction. One customer ran into an unexpected problem: the receptionist was now able to handle the majority of return work using Juno, but no one redistributed the workload around her. She had more on her plate, while the accounting staff had less. It's a solvable problem, but it's a real one. When AI works this well, it doesn't just improve a workflow, it forces a firm to rethink how it's organized.
That's a more honest picture of what AI-driven transformation actually looks like inside a business. And it's exactly the kind of nuance we'd expect a purpose-built, category-specific solution to help customers navigate over time.
Juno's entry point is a focused one, automating the most painful part of return preparation with clear and immediate ROI. But we know that's just the beginning. The tax software landscape is full of legacy incumbents that haven't meaningfully modernized in decades. Some are still shockingly offline, receiving tax code updates on a mailed CD. In a market without a strong modern system of record, there's real room for a system of action to emerge alongside those platforms and eventually expand well beyond them.
We invested because the workflow pain is real, the timing is right, and this team has earned the right to go after it.
