Rulen secures €1.8M to turn tax rules into action with AI

Italian startup Rulen has closed a €1.8 million first funding round to push its AI platform further into tax and accounting. The company, which used to go by LexSA, says the money will go toward product development and commercial expansion. VC Partners led the round, with backing from Growth Engine, AME Ventures, Zest’s Magic Mind vehicle, Alpha Venture and several industry angels.

Rulen is building what it calls an AI operating platform for professionals who spend too much time on repetitive compliance work. The system plugs into existing software and outside systems, including the Italian Revenue Agency’s Cassetto Fiscale, so firms can move from data collection to review and document production while keeping a human in the loop. That matters in a sector where manual work and fragmented tools are still common.

The company is aiming at a very specific problem in Italy’s tax and accounting market: too few younger professionals, and too much work piling up on the ones already there. New registrations in the profession have fallen by 27.3%, and professionals under 40 make up just 15% of the sector. Against that backdrop, automation stops being a nice-to-have and starts looking like a survival tactic.

Rulen says its platform is already used by law and tax firms, specialist practices, groups that consolidate professional firms and multinational companies. The funding announcement also comes with a rebrand, from LexSA to Rulen, to mark its shift from an AI research assistant to something more ambitious: a system that can run end-to-end workflows. Co-founder and CEO Simone Hong says the company was born from the founders’ own struggles hiring junior staff and wasting time on admin. Co-founder and CTO Claudio Cama says the next step is broader automation, more system integrations and AI agents that can handle execution tasks on their own, while professionals keep control.