Founded in 2019, ExpressGroup wants to reimagine fintech products for the working and middle class and is beginning the process by making taxes easier to navigate. The Hamburg-based firm has just secured €25 million in a fresh funding round led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners and Project A Ventures.
ExpressGroup’s goal is to reduce the entry barrier to filing taxes by simplifying the process, allowing the working and middle class to do their taxes in a matter of minutes – rather than being overwhelmed by seemingly endless paperwork. The fintech company provides a convenient data input tool that gathers basic tax information and calculates expected tax returns.
Using an AI-powered backend system, ExpressGroup enables platform partners such as accounting firms, tax consultants, and lawyers to process tax cases in a few minutes. The system uses machine learning and automation features, which in combination with manual work, makes processing income tax returns easier, quicker, and more accurate.
Maximilian Lambsdorff, Co-Founder and CEO of ExpressGroup, explained: “The European working class is notoriously underserved by the fintech industry and we are going to change that by making our services available to anyone — regardless of income, language barriers, or knowledge of the tax system. We democratize financial services for this target group and beyond as our product is ideal for people who have never dealt with optimizing their finances before or rarely have touchpoints with it. We remove all the friction from the users’ side and generate cash payouts for them.”
It’s believed that in Germany alone, 12 million taxpayers, mostly from the working class, never file tax returns and as a result forfeit significant sums of money in refunds every year. According to ExpressGroup, this cohort of people could still receive €38 billion in returns for the last 4 tax years. However, people are mostly overwhelmed with the process, they either do not know that they are eligible for refunds or are afraid to interact with the tax authorities.
Brad Fiedler, Vice President at Insight Partners commented: “ExpressGroup is rethinking fintech products for a traditionally underserved population. They started by making tax refunds accessible to the masses, successfully improving the process from tax preparation to tax automation.”
With their first product, ExpressGroup hit a nerve with the consumer. The product was well received by the target audience allowing the company to grow to over €45 million GMV run-rate in under 12 months. After seeing promising growth in Germany, ExpressGroup has set its sight on the large EU tax market. The new funding will be used to grow the organization internationally and launch adjacent products in more fintech verticals.
Anton Waitz, General Partner at Project A, stated: “ExpressGroup brings positive change to the lives of a very large group of people that have been underserved with easy-to-use digital tools so far. The incredible traction of the ExpressSteuer product will motivate Max and team to build out their offering and make it available to a mass audience in Germany and beyond.”
