The Story of April: Building the Future of Intelligent Tax Infrastructure

The Story of April: Building the Future of Intelligent Tax Infrastructure

The entrepreneurial journey rarely follows a straight path. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, April co-founder Ben Borodach revealed how his path to revolutionizing tax software began long before April was conceived.

Entrepreneurship From Day One

“I actually started my career as a founder,” Ben shares. While studying at NYU, he launched his first venture-backed company, Published. The experience offered early lessons in balancing ambition with execution: “I was literally, like, taking an Uber to a customer meeting or an investor meeting and then going back to class and finding a way to pass my midterm.”

This early venture led Ben to an unexpected realization about enterprise sales challenges, steering him toward Deloitte Consulting: “I went there really to learn about the enterprise and eventually continue my entrepreneurial journey.”

The Path to April

After Deloitte, Ben’s journey through fintech and cybersecurity accelerated. At venture firm Teammate, he incubated and developed multiple successful companies, including Curve (acquired by PayPal) and Visible Risk (acquired by BitSight).

But it was his growing focus on consumer finance that led to April’s genesis. “The last couple of years, been thinking a lot about the future of consumer finance, the future of american households,” Ben explains. This culminated in partnering with Daniel Marcus, former CTO of Waze, to build April.

Reimagining Tax Software

The tax software market hadn’t seen meaningful innovation in decades. While incumbents like TurboTax dominated through massive marketing spend, Ben saw an opportunity to fundamentally reimagine how tax solutions reach consumers.

“We’re entering the age where most of financial services are going to be increasingly delivered online,” Ben notes. “And that means that consumers will increasingly expect that what they’re seeing is completely contextual to them.”

This insight led to April’s innovative B2B2C model, positioning themselves as the infrastructure provider for fintech platforms. Rather than competing directly for consumers, they enable financial platforms to offer tax capabilities to their existing customers.

Building Trust Through Partnership

The approach is working. April has secured partnerships with major platforms like Acorns and Gusto, offering their users seamless tax integration. As Ben explains: “We’ve recently launched a very exciting product with Gusto that actually allows an employee on their platform to constantly track their tax situation in real time based on their Gusto payroll data.”

Their success stems from positioning as a true partner rather than a potential competitor: “We can come kind of as that independent player that’s a true infrastructure provider and in return, get distribution for a product that would otherwise be extremely expensive to market.”

The Vision Ahead

Looking to the future, Ben articulates an ambitious vision for April: “The big picture for April is that whenever the US taxpayer individual small business is going to transact, they can get complete clarity about the impact to their taxes.”

This isn’t just about tax filing – it’s about fundamentally changing how Americans interact with the tax system. By embedding tax intelligence directly into financial platforms, April aims to help users make better financial decisions year-round, not just during tax season.

The early metrics suggest they’re on the right track. With “dozens of companies on the platform” and “hundreds of thousands of users,” plus NPS scores “in the high fifties and sixties,” April is demonstrating that their innovative approach to distribution and customer experience resonates with both partners and end users.

April’s story shows how deep domain expertise, combined with fresh thinking about distribution and customer experience, can open new paths to disrupting even the most entrenched markets. For founders facing similar challenges, it offers a powerful reminder: sometimes the key to success isn’t just building better technology – it’s fundamentally reimagining how that technology reaches the end user.