VC Partners, an Italian venture firm, has led a €1.8M investment in Rulen, a startup in Milan, Italy, whose artificial intelligence (AI) software carries out the repetitive parts of tax and accounting work. The round has closed, and Rulen calls it its first capital increase, in other words its first funding round.
Growth Engine, AME Ventures, Alpha Venture and Zest, through its Magic Mind vehicle, also joined, along with a group of business angels from the industry. Rulen will put the money into product development and sales, and expects to hire about 10 people by the end of the year, from sales and marketing staff to tax specialists.
The startup was called LexSA until this round, when it took its new name. It sells to accountants, tax lawyers, in-house tax teams and the tax assistance centres that help Italians file their returns, and says law and tax firms, groups that buy up professional practices, and multinational companies already use it.
Rather than answer questions like a chatbot, Rulen’s software works through a task from start to finish. It gathers the data, checks it and drafts the documents, and the professional then reviews the result and makes the final call.
What The Software Handles
Rulen’s website describes it, in Italian, as an AI operating platform for automating tax and accounting tasks. The jobs it lists are specific to the Italian system, such as working out IMU, the municipal property tax, and matching payments made on F24, the country’s standard tax payment form.
It also helps prepare income tax returns, both the simpler 730 used by employees and pensioners and the fuller Modello Redditi. It drafts appeals too, and writes interpelli, formal requests asking Italy’s Revenue Agency how a rule applies to a case. Firms can keep their own opinions, templates and precedents in private or shared folders for the software to draw on.
The platform links to the Cassetto Fiscale, the Revenue Agency’s online file of each taxpayer’s returns and payments, as well as to Excel, Word, OneDrive and email. Rulen says customer data is not used to train its models and is held on servers in the European Union. A single user pays €99 a month plus value added tax (VAT), and teams get a custom quote.
From Research Assistant To Agents
The platform, which Rulen says it launched at the end of 2025, began as a research assistant for tax questions and within a few months became a tool that runs whole workflows. The company says its client count grew fivefold in the past three and a half months, and that it now handles thousands of tasks a day.
Simone Hong, co-founder and chief executive, said the new money is meant to speed up that move from assistant to a platform of AI agents. His co-founder Claudio Cama, the chief technology officer, plans to connect more outside systems and build agents that complete tasks on their own.
The founders say they built the company around problems they met in their own work, chiefly how hard it is to hire junior staff and how much time goes on repetitive paperwork. Rulen adds that its team pairs technical skills with tax knowledge, and the new tax hires will help design its agents’ workflows.
A Prize In Southern Italy Last Year
Under the LexSA name, the startup won DigithON 2025, a competition for 100 startups held in Bisceglie, a coastal town in Puglia, in southern Italy. The first prize was a €10,000 cheque from the local branch of Confindustria, Italy’s employers’ association, plus a place on an acceleration programme run by EY. Rulen has since joined A-Road, a growth capital programme for promising Italian scaleups.
Fewer Young Accountants In Italy
The hiring problem the founders describe shows up in the profession’s own figures. Italy’s register of chartered accountants took 1,494 new members in 2025, down from 1,958 in 2024, according to the accountants’ national research foundation. People aged 40 or under made up 15.8% of its 119,050 members at the end of 2025. Stefano Siglienti, managing partner of VC Partners, said tax advisers still lack AI tools made specifically for their field.
Lexroom, an Italian AI platform for law firms and lawyers, raised a €16M Series A led by the American fund Base10 Partners in 2025. Rulen’s focus is narrower, aimed at the daily tax and accounting chores of Italian firms.
Rulen now has fresh backing from VC Partners and a handful of other investors, a new name, and plans to grow its sales team and hire tax experts. Its growth and customer figures are its own, and it has not named any clients.
What started as a research assistant for tax questions now runs whole jobs for accountants and tax lawyers, with the professional still signing off. The next step, by the founders’ account, is software that finishes more of that work by itself.
