Transforming tax compliance into a growth lever for startups

Vertical

Mercury products: IO, Treasury, Invoicing API, Payroll, Quickbooks integration

Most founders treat tax season as a once-a-year fire drill. Inkle exists because that framing ignores an important truth: Compliance deadlines are distributed across eight months of the year, starting with 1099 filings in January and running through corporate extensions in October. Miss one, and the liability compounds just as the company tries to scale.

Founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Inkle is an Al-powered tax and accounting platform that helps startups file state, federal, and cross-border taxes, close the books each month, and manage multi-entity revenue recognition. The platform combines software workflows, AI agents for speed, and human CPAs for judgment, all running on a single pipeline.

For Inkle’s automated bookkeeping to work, every transaction needs correct amounts, timestamps, and merchant details. The platform’s AI agents categorize and reconcile each entry as it comes in, which means errors at the source cascade downstream into the general ledger.

Early on, the team pulled banking data through third-party aggregators — services that screen-scrape bank portals and relay the data. These connections were often unreliable. Transactions would appear duplicated, arrive with missing details, or drop out entirely, breaking the data pipeline that Inkle’s agents depend on.

Essentially, their finance stack lacked two things: a direct API connection to feed accurate transaction data into their system without an intermediary, and a way for internal CPAs to manage hundreds of client accounts without logging into each one individually.

Rather than relying on screen-scraped data, Inkle engineered a direct integration with Mercury’s API. Transactions stream into Inkle’s system as they occur, with full metadata intact — no intermediary, no lag, no missing fields. This is the “ground truth” that Inkle’s AI agents and CPAs both depend on to keep ledgers accurate.

“[The] direct integration makes accounting automation significantly easier… transactions stream in seamlessly, and our agents categorize them in real time.” Arjun Mehta, GTM Lead, Inkle

With clean data flowing in directly, Inkle’s AI agents handle the first pass of transaction categorization. Human CPAs then review and confirm, focusing their time on edge cases and strategic verification rather than manual data entry. The result is a faster close cycle and cleaner books for every client.

Inkle manages accounting and tax for hundreds of venture-backed startups. At that volume, the operational bottleneck isn’t the bookkeeping itself — it’s access to the necessary data. If a CPA needs to check a client’s cash position or pull a recent transaction, logging into each company’s bank account individually doesn’t scale.

Mercury’s Partner Accountant Console solves this by giving Inkle’s finance team a single view across their entire client portfolio. CPAs pull live balance sheets, monitor cash positions, and retrieve transaction data in bulk — without juggling credentials or switching between accounts.

“The Partner Console is basically this portal for us to see all our clients… It just makes our team’s life significantly easier, instead of having to log in to each different company’s account.” Anand Krishna, Co-Founder & CEO, Inkle

After replacing scraped data with a direct API feed, and giving CPAs portfolio-wide visibility through the console, Inkle shifted from manual data entry to strategic oversight. The general ledger reflects actual fund movements with minimal lag, and the firm scales service delivery without scaling headcount proportionally.

• 10+ hours of founder time recaptured monthly: Automated ingestion and categorization of banking data replaces manual bookkeeping for each client.
• Live balance sheet updates: The direct API connection surfaces balance changes within minutes of a transaction occurring.
• Zero missed deadlines: Automated deadline tracking keeps every Inkle client current on filings across all eight compliance months.

“We found the best accounting solution to be a combination of software, services, and AI agents. That is exactly what we were able to build here at Inkle.” Ranvir Singh, Co-Founder & CTO, Inkle

Clean data pipelines and portfolio-wide oversight means Inkle is positioned to take on more clients without proportionally growing its team.

The next filing deadline is Delaware Franchise Tax, March 1, 2026. Inkle is currently offering select free filing services for Mercury customers. Get started and learn more at mercury.com/perks/inkle.