- Skalar has raised €12 million in early-stage funding, led by Headline, to build a tax and accounting firm centred on AI.
- After selling Stocard to Klarna, founder Björn Goß interned at tax firms to gain direct industry experience.
- Over the past three years, more than 300,000 US accountants have left the profession, and 74% of firms are unable to accept new clients.
After selling Stocard to Klarna in a nine-figure deal in 2021, Björn Goß interned at a tax advisory firm to understand the industry’s problems firsthand. He came away convinced that adding AI to existing software wasn’t enough, as a firm needed to be built around AI from the start.
Munich-based Skalar has now raised €12 million in combined pre-seed and seed funding to test that idea, led by Headline, with support from futurepresent, QED Investors, Repeat, MS&AD, Foreword and a group of angel investors.
Goß started Skalar in 2025 with Niklas Wagener, Florian Lang, Martin Gugel, and Christian Pötter. It launched out of Munich in 2026. The company hasn’t shared how many people it currently employs.
Taking direct ownership of client relationships
Two well-funded competitors are addressing the same labour shortage in different ways.
Basis raised $100 million at a $1.15 billion valuation, offering AI agents that plug into existing accounting firms and claiming that 30% of the top 25 US firms already use it. Accrual closed a $75 million round, led by General Catalyst, on the same premise, piloting with H&R Block.
Both provide tools that help existing firms work faster. Neither replaces the firm. Skalar does.
Clients link their financial systems directly to Skalar’s platform, where Skalar’s tax experts, working alongside AI agents, serve as the official advisors. That means Skalar carries the professional liability, regulatory registration, and client relationships that Basis and Accrual leave with their customers. If an AI agent misclassifies a transaction or misses a filing deadline, that’s Skalar’s problem.
Goß frames that as the whole point: “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. I saw these firms from the inside. The only solution is to rebuild the industry from scratch.”
Jonathan Becker, general partner at Headline, makes the same case from the investor side. “Most teams in this space are layering AI onto existing software. The demos look good, but you’re still running on the same brittle foundations, just with better packaging. Tax and accounting are broken enough that the only real fix is rebuilding the firm itself around AI and owning the service end to end,” Becker adds.
Here’s what this round doesn’t settle: Basis and Accrual have raised more, serve larger clients, and carry far less regulatory risk per client than Skalar’s model implies. Skalar has speed and control. What it doesn’t have yet is proof that its agents are reliable enough to put its own name on the filing.
The traction numbers
The labour shortage behind all three companies is real. In the United States, more than 300,000 accountants and auditors have left the profession in the past three years, and the pool of new accounting graduates has fallen to its lowest level in roughly 20 years, according to the American Institute of CPAs.
Skalar’s press materials also cite a Bundessteuerberaterkammer figure indicating that more than 30% of German tax advisors are over 61 and approaching retirement, and a 2025 Accounting Talent Index, showing that 74% of firms can no longer take on new clients.
Skalar says that in areas it has already automated, one tax expert can now serve over 100 clients, up from about 20 before, and that it has handled more than 1,000 client requests in its first three months. All of these figures are self-reported and only weeks old. It’s not clear how much of that client work is actually done by the AI agents versus by people.
The global tax technology market was worth roughly $20.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $60.7 billion by 2034, according to Precedence Research. A market that size has room for more than one model to work. Software for firms that want to keep existing, and AI-native firms like Skalar for clients who care more about getting the filing right than who signs it.
Basis and Accrual have already shown AI can do tax work. Skalar’s wager is that owning the liability earns more trust than bolting AI onto a firm a client already has. Nothing in this round proves that yet. It’s just the first real test.
