Tax software has traditionally waited for an invitation. It arrives near the end of winter, asks a household to remember the previous year, and turns ordinary life into a stack of forms. Ben Borodach would prefer it behave less like an annual visitor and more like plumbing: present, connected, and useful without demanding applause. His company, april, puts tax filing and planning inside the financial products people already use. The ambition is almost comic in its neatness. Make the most ceremonial chore in American finance fade into the background.
The path to that idea was not neat. It ran through a college startup, consulting rooms, a venture foundry, cybersecurity companies, a co-founder courtship conducted partly through long written manifestos, and years of regulatory construction. Borodach has spent his career near complicated systems. Over time, complexity stopped looking like an obstacle and began to look like the address.
At New York University, where he studied economics, he started a marketing-automation company called Hublished. He raised outside money, worked from the first WeWork location, and has recalled taking cars to exams while keeping the company moving. His parents refused to let him drop out. He later conceded that they were right.
The startup did not become his final act. It supplied something more useful: first-time mistakes in bulk. Borodach decided against raising more money even when it was available and tried to reach product-market fit on fumes. Eventually, the young team confronted the oldest founder discovery of all. They did not know what they did not know.
“Have more fun and be a little bit easier on yourself.”Advice Borodach gave his younger founder self
An education in the machinery
He joined Deloitte Consulting in 2015 and worked with large banks and insurers on growth, acquisitions, innovation, and technology strategy. Economics had pulled him toward finance; consulting showed him the machinery at institutional scale. Large financial organizations did not lack ideas. They carried layers of infrastructure, regulation, and organizational history that made each new idea negotiate with the past.
Two years later, he moved to Team8, a venture group built around creating companies in cybersecurity and financial technology. Borodach helped with strategy, fundraising, recruiting, market research, and the expansion of the firm. He also worked on ventures including Curv, a crypto-security company later acquired by PayPal, and Visible Risk, a cyber-risk business later acquired by BitSight.
It was a useful perch between operator and investor. A venture studio cannot merely admire a market. It has to assemble the people, capital, thesis, and first version of the company. At Team8, Borodach learned to treat company creation as a sequence of risks to remove. He also helped create a cybersecurity index with WisdomTree and a doctoral fellowship program with Tel Aviv University.
Then he turned toward consumer finance. Savings, investing, and payments were being unbundled into apps and then recombined inside platforms. Taxes remained stranded. They were retrospective, seasonal, and separate from the transactions that created them. A stock sale could produce a future bill, but the tax consequence might not become vivid until months later. A payroll decision affected cash flow now, yet planning often waited until filing.
Borodach saw the tax return as more than a compliance artifact. It is a compact record of a financial life: earnings, investments, a move, a new business, a changed household. If software could use that context at the moment money moved, tax might stop being an isolated reckoning and become part of everyday financial decision-making.
Manifestos before software
To build it, he needed a technical counterpart. Team8 introduced him to Daniel Marcous, a data scientist and technology leader who had worked at Google and Waze. Borodach has described the search as co-founder dating, although most dates do not assign homework of constitutional importance.
Each wrote a lengthy manifesto about values, the world, and the company they might build. They edited each other's documents until no important disagreement remained. The exercise established both alignment and difference. Marcous excelled at invention, taking a product from minus one to zero. Borodach brought operating structure, partnerships, and the work of scaling. Agreement did not require identical talents. It required a shared map and enough trust to argue over the route.
They founded april in 2021 and chose a business-to-business-to-consumer model. Instead of persuading people to download one more financial app, april would live inside banks, payroll products, wealth platforms, and fintech services. The partner held the customer relationship and much of the relevant data. april supplied white-label filing, estimation, planning, and tax intelligence.
The arrangement follows a simple behavioral truth: people rarely yearn to spend more time thinking about tax. Borodach's dream is that taxes are handled around the user while that person is getting paid, saving, investing, or receiving credit. The product belongs beside the transaction, not in a separate annual pilgrimage.
The compound startup, built one layer at a time
The compound startup
Founders are often advised to begin with a narrow wedge. Tax did not cooperate. april needed code that represented dense and changing rules, authorization to transmit filings, connections to federal and state agencies, secure data systems, partner integrations, and a calm interface for the person at the end. The problem was compound, so the company had to be compound too.
National e-file coverage took years. april began with federal filing and a limited group of states, then widened the map. In early 2025 it became the first new provider in 15 years to reach authorization across all 50 states. Borodach has said only about ten companies had achieved comparable full coverage. The milestone was not a shiny feature. It was permission for every other feature to matter at national scale.
Artificial intelligence accelerated the work, but Borodach's description is notably unmagical. Domain experts define logic. AI transforms it into code. Engineers validate and ship. The system is designed around frequent rule changes and human oversight. In a regulated product, speed without accountability is simply a faster route to an unpleasant letter.
When a market's complexity cannot be removed, sequence it. Build the rule layer, the regulatory rails, the data connections, and distribution in an order that makes each next risk cheaper to confront.
The company said its median self-service filing time fell below 25 minutes, compared with the many hours commonly spent preparing a return. During the 2024 tax season, april was available through more than 50 partners and processed hundreds of thousands of returns. In July 2025, it announced a $38 million Series B led by QED Investors, with Nyca Partners and Team8 participating. The round brought reported total funding to $78 million.
Money does not shorten the tax code. It does give april more room to expand its partner network and push beyond filing into planning and real-time recommendations. Borodach's long-term phrase for the destination is a trusted tax operating system behind major financial apps.
Impatience, properly employed
Borodach once named impatience as a personal challenge. His first april product launched in three months, which felt slow to him anyway. The irony is useful. He chose a business where national progress would be measured in years, jurisdictions, exceptions, and filing seasons.
His response has been to cut ceremonial work while staying close to actual work. An early company mantra discouraged meetings that could be emails, hour-long meetings that could take 30 minutes, and recurring meetings in general. More recently, he described leaders reading support tickets, inspecting product specifications, troubleshooting issues, and listening to customers. A flexible calendar is not leisure. It is room for the problem to interrupt.
“Tax shouldn't be scary. It should be a source of empowerment.”Ben Borodach on april's purpose
He tells aspiring founders to avoid copying a collage of other people's successes. Follow the work that holds genuine interest. Play to your strengths. Be easier on yourself. Coming from a self-described impatient operator, the advice carries the faint sound of hard-won negotiations with his own temperament.
The same tension animates april. Tax is slow-moving law applied to fast-moving lives. A founder cannot make the rules simple, but a product can make their consequences timely. It can notice context, prepare the machinery, and meet a person where the money already is.
That would make tax season less of a season. The forms would still exist, as immortal and cheerful as office carpeting, but the surprise might shrink. Borodach's wager is that the best tax experience will not feel like a heroic annual performance. It will feel like something quietly handled.