Building a Tax Engine with Ben Borodach

Tax is not a product most people associate with innovation. 

For most Americans, tax is something to be endured annually, delegated reluctantly and forgotten as quickly as possible. 

Ben Borodach wants to change all of that. 

As Co-founder and CEO of April, an artificial intelligence-powered (AI) tax infrastructure platform, Borodach has spent five years building the connective tissue that he believes the US financial system is missing: a way to make tax not just easier for the average American, but genuinely useful, all year long.

In the most recent edition of CMC Aureon Sessions, Borodach sits down to talk about building a company in the fintech space, and the ways he hopes to change American tax habits both in and out of tax season. 

He emphasises that April’s story is one of methodical construction, rather than the rapid growth venture capital has come to expect. April spent its first few years almost invisible, assembling the regulatory permissions, technical architecture and partner relationships that would let it eventually surface inside the platforms where millions of Americans already manage their money. The result is a business that filed roughly 1.4 million federal and state tax returns in its most recent season, yet remains one most consumers have never heard of. 

That, Borodach explains, is entirely the point.

Embedding tax in every financial decision

The founding premise of April is straightforward, belying its importance. “We started the company about five years ago with this grand vision to embed tax in every financial decision,” Borodach says. “Tax is the largest expense most Americans have throughout the year. We pay several trillion dollars to the US government, and to many of the states that need that money in order to function.”

Yet for all its scale, tax has historically operated in a silo. For most Americans, it is addressed once a year, in isolation from the everyday financial decisions it so heavily influences. Borodach argues that this disconnect represents a structural failure in how financial services have been designed. In his view, filing taxes “is not just a compliance activity that needs to happen once a year. It’s actually an ongoing activity” with a significant impact on “retirement planning or withholding optimisation, or thinking about saving for your children’s future and your estate.”

The implications ripple across the entire spectrum of American financial life. A W-2 employee who never revisits their withholding, a small business owner making estimated payments late, a soon-to-retire investor weighing a Roth conversion – each faces tax consequences that are deeply material to their financial outcomes, yet almost none of the digital tools they use every day are equipped to help them navigate those consequences in real time.

April’s answer is the “tax engine”, a term that refers not to a user-facing app but to the computational and regulatory infrastructure that powers tax filing. April is, by Borodach’s count, one of only 12 companies in the US that holds a chartered tax engine, meaning it has cleared the federal and state approval processes that authorise it to actually submit returns on behalf of taxpayers. 

As a relative newcomer, how does April aim to differentiate itself from legacy giants like Intuit’s [INTU] TurboTax? Connectivity, Borodach explains. “Our mission is to develop the world’s most connected tax software … that’s how we differentiate between the monoliths that have dominated the industry for 40 or 50 years, that were built before cloud, before mobile, certainly before AI. They’re all trying to reinvent themselves now, but the reality is they have code bases and infrastructure that are just decades old.”

That technical inheritance, Borodach suggests, is a structural barrier to the kind of deep integration with other financial platforms that April was designed to enable.

Targeting partners, not end users

April is, by design, a company that most of its users will never encounter directly. Its products are embedded inside other financial platforms – neobanks, payroll providers, brokerage apps – where they appear as a seamless capability within a broader product experience. This integration reflects a considered view about where the real opportunity in tax technology lies.

The insight crystallised during Borodach’s time at venture fund Team8, where he was working alongside co-founders and advisors, including eToro [ETOR] Co-founder Ronen Assia and researchers from the Jim Simons family office, Euclidean Capital. What emerged from those conversations was a picture of a financial services landscape undergoing a significant transformation as services proliferated and regulatory hurdles became easier to clear.  

“You now have banking as a service, you have investing as a service, you have payments as a service. Getting over the regulatory rails is still difficult, but it’s not nearly as hard as it was 15 and 20 years ago. And so you’re moving to a world where actually getting a debit card or a payment product or even an investing product is much less difficult.”

The proliferation of financial apps that followed – Robinhood [HOOD], Venmo, Chime [CHYM] and dozens of others – created a paradox. Americans gained access to more financial tools than ever before, but their financial lives became increasingly fragmented in the process. The missing piece, in Borodach’s view, was tax: the one activity that touches every corner of a household’s financial life, yet remained absent from the digital platforms where that financial life was being lived.

“Financial advisory platforms, digital platforms and banking platforms are ill-equipped. They want to manage money. They want to help Americans better save for their future. But something that has a massive effect on those dollars” – taxes – “is just someone else’s problem,” Borodach explained.

April’s proposition to financial institutions is that tax is an opportunity to deepen customer relationships at the moments that matter most. A tax filing is, in Borodach’s framing, a uniquely intimate data event – a moment when a customer’s entire financial year is laid bare, revealing life events, income changes and financial needs that a savvy platform can respond to with genuinely useful products and advice.

“Tax is a linchpin, something everybody has to do. It’s difficult. And if you solve it, you’re actually building a conversation with the customer about their life because everything good, bad and otherwise, comes out on the tax return. You lost a loved one, you got married, you moved, you got a promotion, you lost your job. It’s all there.”

In practice, April’s embedded model means that a Chime customer can file their taxes and receive their refund five days early without leaving the Chime app; a ZenBusiness user can get a consultation about the tax implications of starting their company in the same platform where they bank as a small business owner; and every seller of secondary shares on a Nasdaq-connected platform receives a real-time estimate of what they owe on their RSUs at the point of transaction.

Building to scale

The path from founding vision to operational scale has been neither quick nor straightforward. April spent its first three years almost entirely in R&D mode, going state by state to secure the regulatory approvals needed to file returns nationally, while simultaneously building the technical foundation of its tax products. The company was, in Borodach’s own description, not yet a revenue business in any meaningful sense – a reality that tested its investors’ patience as the broader venture market tightened in 2022 and 2023.

“Last year was the first year that we really scaled up, as we got to our first $1m of ARR,” Borodach notes. But, he admits, “that was after we’d already spent $50m.”

Borodach is candid about how difficult that period was, but insistent that the front-loaded investment in infrastructure was the only path to the position April now occupies. Tax is a domain where accuracy is non-negotiable and trust is earned slowly. Rushing to scale before those foundations were in place would have been potentially fatal to the business.

“We spent a lot of time doing education in the beginning because these are people who are experts in payments and lending and financial services and consumer brands,” Borodach says. However, “no one knew anything about tax. And so we spent a lot of time just explaining to people what our plans were, what the risks were, how we were going about bridging the gap and incorporating tax compliantly into a regulated financial entity.”

The approach to growth has been similarly deliberate. Rather than maximising short-term revenue from its earliest partners, April focused on delivering flawlessly – accepting lower volumes in order to maintain the quality of the customer experience and protect its partners’ reputations. Chime, one of April’s earliest and most significant partners, was brought on through a sequence of beta, pilot and phased rollout before reaching anything like full scale.

“The risk that we have is not, ‘can I sell this? … It’s ‘can I deliver this in a trustworthy manner?” For that reason, Borodach says, slow and careful growth is often the sustainable route to take. “Our view is, if you zoom out, even if we grow a little bit slower, but we do it in a trusted way, that will be part of our differentiation.”

That patience has begun to compound. April grew nine times in revenue last year, achieved a net promoter score of 76 in its most recent tax season and is now described by Borodach as the 8th-largest online tax provider in the US. The company is accelerating into the wealth management and small business segments, building out professional filing tools alongside its consumer products and exploring how AI can extend the tax planning conversation into real-time financial decision-making.

“It’s all about scale, growth and impact. We spent four to five years building quietly, arduously,” Borodach says. “And now it’s our opportunity to have an impact and take this technology to market and get in front of every American household with one of our products and help them have a better financial outcome.”