Leverage the wealthwhich started in 2018 primarily offering financial advice to startup founders and employees, expanded into tax advice and raised a $17 million expansion in Series A roundbringing that funding to $32 million.
It offers a new tax advisory platform that it says enhances the practices of leading tax advisers and enables a comprehensive service to resolve the financial complexities of its consumer clients. The Harness offering also has two other components, which serve as a marketplace to discover advisors and financial information services and tools for consumers.
Since its last raise in June 2021, Harness claims to have grown its customer base 10x and seen a 1588% jump in gross revenue growth, though it declined to disclose hard revenue numbers or customer numbers. For example, in addition to serving several tech founders, Harness now counts professional athletes, an artist whose work is at MoMA, an Amazon board member and an “iconic” journalist as clients, the CEO told TechCrunch and co-founder David Snider. Prior to Series A, Harness Wealth primarily focused on technology industry employees as capital market activity boomed and there were growing and time-sensitive needs of this population to manage their equity capital.
“The needs of this group led us to the gap in the market for high quality, digitally enabled tax services,” he said. To meet this need, Harness partnered with experienced tax advisors who in most cases already had a significant roster of clients. So when these consultants partnered with Harness, many of those clients became Harness clients as well.
But Snider hopes this new tax advice platform will be useful to an even broader clientele than the ultra-wealthy. To this end, this startup has already been selected as a tax partner by two of the largest financial institutions in the US
“There are still thousands of tech ecosystem builders, although there are also ‘builders’ of all kinds – small and private business owners, professional services executives, investors, etc.,” he said.
“The increasing prevalence of equity ownership, state-to-state moves and investments in alternative asset classes have led to our focus on building a proprietary tax solution,” also part of what led Harness to create this new platform includes recent changes in tax law since Inflation Reduction Actwhich could have significant implications for high-income individuals, such as “a massive increase in taxpayer audits,” said Snider, the former CFO at Compass.
Simply put, the new platform “enhances collaboration between tax advisors and their clients,” the company said. About 75% of Harness’s clients come through advisors who join the platform. Twenty-five percent are consumers.
Three Fish Capital, the business arm of the Galvin family (founders of Motorola), led the latest funding, which included participation from existing backers Jackson Square Ventures, Day One Ventures, Northwestern Mutual Ventures and Paul Edgerley, former co-head of Bain Capital . private funds. Other investors include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Alleycorp’s Kevin Ryan, Compass founder Ori Allon, Angi’s Oisin Hanrahan and Edith Cooper, a director on the boards of Pepsico and Amazon. The company declined to disclose its valuation, but typically valuations remain stable in expansion rounds.
Want more fintech news in your inbox? Subscribe to TechCrunch Fintech here.
