CereTax comes out of stealth with $10M seed round, Fortune 500 customers

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Aug 15, 2022, 08:15 ET

Repeat tax software entrepreneurs launch the Sales Tax Automation Platform for complex enterprises.

The platform provides granular geo-targeting, a universal rules engine, and an API to enable real-time calculations to put sales tax automation on autopilot for a wide variety of vertical markets.

ATLANTA, Aug. 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CereTax, the next-generation sales tax automation platform, came out of stealth today and announced the first wave of key customers and partners using the platform.

CereTax came to life because the founders, after decades working with the legacy platforms, realized that existing sales tax automation solutions designed for complex verticals and larger enterprises had become antiquated. This led to slow performance, frequent downtime, expensive customizations, and hours of maintenance efforts. While modern cloud-based SaaS solutions have been created to solve many business problems, they haven't yet proliferated the enterprise sales tax space.

"Our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution was built using a modern approach to take advantage of native cloud architecture. This design allows for API-driven integrations, rapid performance with high reliability, the ability to handle sales tax, purchases (use tax), validation, analytics, and omnichannel sales for multiple verticals, all through one platform," said Mike Sanders, CereTax CEO. "Shockingly, a new tax automation solution for complex or enterprise businesses has not been built in over 20 years. A lot has changed in two decades, so we set out to address that market need."

In the US alone, across cities, counties, and states, larger businesses must account for over 17,000 different sales tax jurisdictions and how they apply to thousands of products being bought and sold. These rules often change monthly, making calculations and compliance extremely challenging. Getting these calculations wrong is very costly, and larger businesses can see fines and penalties that create liabilities in the millions of dollars per year.

The leadership team's experience includes successfully building Tax Partners (acquired by Thomson Reuters), CCH SureTax (acquired by Wolters Kluwer), and many years implementing tax solutions for KPMG, Ryan, and EY. This domain knowledge provided the background and experience to identify and solve complex sales tax problems.

A great case study is one we just completed for a large, multinational manufacturing company.

"Before our introduction to CereTax, we were struggling to identify our correct sales tax liabilities accurately and in a timely manner, which had a significant impact on our costs and time," said their Tax Director. "We had to bring together multiple solutions, consultants, and our tax team to get it done. With thousands of transactions to evaluate monthly, we were in a very challenging spot. After launching CereTax in parallel with our existing systems, we were immediately able to recognize huge cost and time savings while ensuring we were complying with all the regulations. The CereTax team is extremely knowledgeable and responsive, making the launch and ongoing operations seamless."

Other incumbents and start-ups in the sales tax space are focused on the more simplified needs of small businesses and have not yet developed the product architecture, industry specific capabilities, and customer service model to serve complex enterprises.

"The needs of complex businesses selling into multiple vertical markets in numerous jurisdictions are very different from small companies," said Brent Walker, CereTax VP of Operations. "To satisfy their needs, you need to deliver specialized taxability decisions, granular geo-targeting, an extensible rules engine, real-time processing, and continuous learning. You need to take an extremely complicated operating environment and streamline it to make it easy to manage."

CereTax is building deep integrations with an expanding set of ERPs, accounting, and operational systems to enable quick deployments and real-time operations.

"We are very enthusiastic about the market reception and look forward to soon announcing additional innovative capabilities and a network of implementation partners," said Mike Sanders, CEO.

"We have worked with members of the CereTax leadership team for years. We are excited to be working with them again to bring to market a key integration to the Coupa business spend management platform," said Robert Kleppel, Partner, KPMG. "We look forward to showing the market how blending the expertise of the KPMG team and new technology of CereTax can greatly benefit Coupa users."

Leaders Fund led the seed round with participation from investors in the founders previous two companies. With this capital, CereTax will extend its product offering for additional vertical markets, expand its team and its partner ecosystem, and continue to become the tax automation solution for complex verticals and larger enterprises.

SOURCE CereTax