Image: © Andrey Popov/Stock.adobe.com
Fonoa, founded by former Uber employees, said it will use the funding to expand internationally and grow its team.
Dublin-based Fonoa has raised $25m to fund further development of its global tax automation platform and help it expand internationally.
Fonoa helps companies with cross-border transactions to automate their tax payments and create invoices that are locally compliant. Some of its major clients include Lime, Uber, Teachable, GoStudent and Zoom, and it said it helps execute more than 300m tax transactions per year.
The recent funding round was backed by Index Ventures, OMERS Ventures, FJ Labs, Moving Capital and others.
Angel investors who participated include Gautam Gupta, former COO and CFO at Opendoor and Uber; Kevin Hartz, co-founder of Eventbrite; Prabir Adarkar, CFO at Doordash; Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, partner at Index Ventures and former COO of GoCardless; and Allison Barr Allen, COO of Fast.
“In the digital world, businesses and customers transact on a global scale. Country borders are no longer a limiting factor, and technology drives global trade at an ever-increasing speed,” said Fonoa co-founder and CEO Davor Tremac.
“Combined with the increased scrutiny by regulators, dealing with tax matters in a more automated and trusted way has become an ever-more pressing issue. We built a one-stop solution that handles the complexities of tax globally, allowing digital businesses to focus on growing their core business.”
Tremac founded Fonoa in 2019 with former Uber colleagues Filip Sturman and Ivan Ivankovic. It currently supports tax automation transactions across more than 100 countries – and aims to expand this to more than 140 countries by the end of the year.
“The Fonoa team has identified and solved a genuine problem for businesses, with a product that enables businesses to manage their tax obligations seamlessly through one API,” said Hannah Seal, principal at Index Ventures.
She added that innovation around tax payments has not caught up with innovation in other forms of payment, and that Fonoa aims to change this trend.
“The Fonoa team has built a brilliant platform that solves [the tax] problem elegantly, providing a streamlined solution to enable businesses to operate and grow across the world,” said Jambu Palaniappan, managing partner at OMERS Ventures.
As well as international expansion, Fonoa will also use the fresh funding to hire new staff across all areas of its business. The start-up is headquartered in Dublin but has a remote-first approach to business and a distributed team across 14 countries in Europe, the US and Asia.
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