Aibidia, a leading European transfer pricing platform, has raised a €13 million Series A round co-led by DN Capital and FPV Ventures, with existing investors Icebreaker.vc and Global Founders Capital also supporting the round. The fresh capital will be used to further expand Aibidia’s world-class team and global presence in London and Helsinki and continue innovating the platform.
Aibidia was founded in 2014 with the goal to help multinational enterprises and their advisors manage global cross-border business and related transfer pricing obligations together, on the same platform. Using the technology, multinationals like Volvo, Bridgestone and Recipharm can effectively define fair global transfer pricing and automate related reporting. It empowers such companies to consequently comply with global cross-border tax obligations and regulations.
Today, more than 80% of the world’s trade is driven by transfer pricing (TP) – internal transactions made by multinationals, and thus effectively contributing to the communities within which they operate. It’s a highly regulated practice designed to ensure a multinational’s taxes are fairly distributed and collected as part of the wider, $28 trillion international trade sector. For these companies, there is also potential transfer pricing tax liabilities that come through operating on a cross-border, global model.
Until now, managing transfer pricing has been a laborious and expensive process which, despite the widespread adoption of spreadsheets and databases, remains largely manual. Aibidia’s technology finally modernizes and speeds up this process, resulting in significantly lower costs and increased control and visibility to businesses.
Aibidia’s platform currently facilitates collaboration for all stakeholders including the in-house finance and tax teams and external advisors. In the future, this will also include tax authorities. Unlike other transfer pricing technologies, Aibidia uniquely allows these stakeholders to collaborate on transfer pricing workflows together, and define, allocate and report tax issues at the click of a button.
Not only does the platform deliver time and cost savings, it helps companies respond to shifting market and regulatory conditions at a time when the burden of transfer pricing for multinationals is significant and increasing, because of international tax reforms – including changing transfer pricing regulations in the UK, as well as BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting), which is being implemented by the OECD.
Hannu-Tapani Leppänen, Aibidia CEO commented: “At Aibidia we’re helping solve one of the biggest problems for multinational companies. We’ve built the first data-driven, end-to-end platform where all TP stakeholders can conduct their activities without the time and cost restraints that have plagued the sector for decades. We have big plans for the coming months and years and it’s fantastic to have FPV Ventures, DN Capital, Icebreaker.vc and GFC with us for the journey.”
Aibidia’s world-class team has 100 years of TP experience. Founder and CEO Hannu-Tapani Leppänen is a lawyer, former manager at EY and has more than twenty years’ experience providing international tax advisory to multinational enterprises. He previously founded transfer pricing advisory firm Alder and Sound.
Leveraging this expertise, the Aibidia team has translated reams of complex transfer pricing laws from 150+ countries into code to build its Digital Transfer Pricing Taxonomy and API. This allows multinationals to integrate features and functionality like never before. The platform now manages 5000+ entities across 150+ jurisdictions from offices in Helsinki and London, and has signed partnerships with PwC Finland plus other leading global accounting and consulting member firms.
Teemu Mattila, Partner at DN Capital, stated: “We love software products which use modern technologies to transform old industries and automate manual, resource-heavy processes. This is exactly what Aibidia does with its AI, data, and automation-driven transfer pricing management platform. Hannu is a visionary founder who has built a truly unique product and a world-class team at Aibidia who we are proud to support in the next stage of their growth journey.”
Riku Seppälä, General Partner at Icebreaker.vc, said: “Finding a founder and team with such strong expertise, product market fit and ambition is an ideal for investors at the best of times. Let alone during times of economic uncertainty. The diligent and steady way Hannu-Tapani and his team have approached the growth of Aibidia, even since we joined them at pre-seed, inspires a huge amount of confidence for the future and we’re pleased to be continuing our individual journey with them, but also see FPV and DN Capital join the fold to help take Aibidia to even higher levels.”
