Executive Summary

Tax Labs is the shared technology platform — the picks & shovels — that powers vertical-specific tax-recovery startups across the EU. We give any niche recovery operator the AI, tax-authority connectivity, open banking, and cross-vertical intelligence they'd otherwise spend a technical team and 18 months building — for a blend of usage fees, licensing, and equity. In effect, we are the outsourced CTO of an entire category. Recommended brand: Reclaim · reclaim.tax (§7).

€89B

EU VAT gap — proxy for the recoverable-tax pool hi

€17–23B

Est. unclaimed pool / yr across six recovery verticals md

Shared capability layers, delivered as one platform

$0.5–2M

What each vertical spends rebuilding this alone (12–18 mo) md

1.1 The story on one page

Situation — a fragmenting marketEU tax recovery is splitting into dozens of niches: truck fuel VAT, SME VAT, cross-border per-diems, import duty, corporate-travel VAT, e-commerce. Each is a real business someone is building.
Insight — the tax is the niche, the tech is the commodityEvery vertical needs the same eleven technical capabilities — ingest, extract, validate, connect to tax offices & banks, score, keep a human in the loop. Today each one rebuilds them alone, badly and expensively.
Wedge — build it once, share itTax Labs provides those eleven layers as one multi-tenant platform. Cheaper per transaction than any single vertical can achieve — and it gets smarter with every vertical added.
Model — CTO-as-a-serviceUsage fees cover fixed cost, licensing adds predictability, and equity aligns us as the technical co-founder of each operator we power.
Moat — the data network effectPooled, privacy-safe intelligence across verticals — fraud signals, recovery-success priors, benchmarks — that no single operator could ever accumulate.

1.2 What we provide

Eleven shared layers, one integration. Full architecture in Platform §5.

OCR extraction e-invoice automation Inference gateway Tax-office connectivity Open banking Cross-vertical intelligence AI ingestion pipeline Expert advisory RAG over legislation Confidence + HITL Cloud · auth · multi-tenancy

1.3 Market, competition & timing

The opportunity

The EU VAT gap runs ≈€89B¹; the unclaimed pool across our six verticals is an estimated €17–23B/yr. We sit on four fast-growing enabling-tech markets — intelligent document processing (~$2.5B, 27–34% CAGR), EU open banking (€9.6B, ~24% CAGR), EU RegTech (€4.6B) and EU tax software (~$4–5B).² Bottom-up, a serviceable-obtainable platform revenue of €0.6–1.2M by Year 3 scaling to €5–16M by Year 5 at 40–80 operators. Market §3

The white space

No incumbent occupies the recovery-specialised × infrastructure-for-others quadrant. Compliance platforms (Sovos, Avalara, Fonoa) handle tax obligations; recovery operators (VAT IT, Eurowag) own their own fee and don't sell infrastructure; point vendors (Mindee, Tink) each cover one layer. The build cost per vertical (~$0.5–2M, 12–18 mo) is exactly what a platform removes. Competition §4

Why now

Three forces converge: e-invoicing mandates (EU ViDA — mandatory cross-border digital reporting from July 2030) turn messy documents into clean feeds; open banking (PSD2→PSD3) makes bank connectivity a composable ingredient; and the collapse in AI inference cost makes extraction a commodity — shifting all the durable value to the reconciliation, rules, and cross-vertical intelligence layers that only a platform at scale can own. Thesis §2.5

1.4 Why we win

Economies of scale

One best-version stack across many operators pushes cost-per-transaction below any single vertical's reach; fixed cost amortises, each new transaction is mostly margin. Model §6

Data network effect

Every vertical sharpens fraud detection, recovery-success prediction and benchmarks for all — privacy-safe intelligence that compounds into a moat.

CTO-as-a-service

Operators get an expert technical layer and advisory without a technical hire; the equity lever aligns us as their co-founder.

1.5 The model & the recommendation

Lever	Role
Usage	Per-transaction fee — covers fixed cloud + compute; no downside.
Licensing	Platform subscription — recurring, predictable revenue.
Equity	Co-build / CTO-as-a-service tier — captures the upside & aligns incentives.

Pure-usage is always available so equity-averse operators can still buy; equity is reserved for the early co-build tier. Model §6

Recommendation

Build the platform as a thin vertical slice first — one recovery vertical end-to-end (the truck-tax reference is the natural POC) — then harden it into a multi-tenant platform and fan out to new verticals and countries. Adopt the brand Reclaim and own the tax-recovery infrastructure category before anyone names it. Roadmap §9

The one-liner for investors

Stripe let every startup skip building payments; Plaid let them skip bank connectivity. Tax Labs lets every tax-recovery operator in Europe skip building the entire technical and regulatory backbone — and pays us in usage, licensing, and a slice of each business we make possible.

Sources: 1 EU VAT gap — EC / DG TAXUD VAT Gap (hi). · 2 Enabling-tech market sizes & SOM model — see Market §3 for full workings, sources and confidence flags. · ViDA timeline — EC VAT in the Digital Age (hi). · Competitive white space & per-vertical build cost — Competition §4 (md; partly estimated).