Skalar raises €12m seed round to build AI-native tax firm
Skalar, a Munich-based AI-first tax and accounting firm, has announced €12 million (approximately $13.8 million) in combined pre-seed and seed funding. The round was led by Headline, a venture capital firm managing more than $4 billion in assets, with participation from futurepresent, QED Investors, Repeat, MS&AD and Foreword, alongside a group of angel investors.
The company was founded in 2025 by Björn Goß alongside co-founders Niklas Wagener, Florian Lang, Martin Gugel and Christian Pötter. Goß previously co-founded Stocard, a digital wallet application he scaled to more than 70 million users before selling it to Klarna in a nine-figure deal in 2021. After that exit, Goß took internships inside traditional tax advisory firms and concluded that existing software was simply not designed to support automation at scale.
The thesis
Skalar's founding argument is that simply layering AI onto legacy accounting software does not address the structural problems in the industry. The company is instead building a proprietary technology stack designed around AI from the outset, pairing AI agents with human tax experts to handle high-volume, repetitive compliance tasks. Clients connect their financial systems directly to the Skalar platform, where agents process workloads with the aim of freeing human advisors to focus on real-time advisory rather than reconstructing historical records.
Early operational figures suggest meaningful productivity gains: in areas where it has already deployed automation, Skalar reports that a single tax expert can now service more than 100 clients, up from around 20 previously. The company also received more than 1,000 client enquiries in its first three months of operation. Those figures are self-reported and have not been independently verified.
"Many industries hope AI will solve their structural problems. The reality is the opposite: AI will accelerate the decline of many incumbents and create new companies that will redefine the industry," said Björn Goß, co-founder and chief executive of Skalar. "I saw these firms from the inside. The only solution is to rebuild the industry from scratch."
Market context
The market conditions driving Skalar's thesis are well-documented. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has recorded a net exit of more than 300,000 accountants and auditors from the profession within three years, and the American Institute of CPAs reports new accounting graduates at a 20-year low. In Germany, the Federal Chamber of Tax Advisors (BStBK) notes that more than 30% of registered tax advisors are over 61 and approaching retirement. The 2025 Accounting Talent Index, cited in the release, found that 74% of firms can no longer take on new clients.
A number of well-funded software vendors are competing in adjacent territory, offering AI-assisted workflows bolted onto existing practice-management platforms. Skalar's differentiation is vertical integration: rather than selling software to incumbent firms, it operates as the firm itself, which shifts the business model from SaaS licensing to service delivery. That approach carries different regulatory obligations, particularly around professional licensing requirements for tax advisors in Germany, where the BStBK governs who may provide tax advice commercially.
The funding will be used to extend Skalar's AI systems and automate additional workflows. Jonathan Becker, General Partner at Headline, argued that the only credible fix for an industry "broken enough" is to own the service end-to-end rather than improve the packaging on existing foundations. The company's next publicly visible milestones will likely be customer volume figures and the scope of workflow automation it can demonstrate at scale.