HF06_ZipperTax.txt

Honors Fund is thrilled to announce our recent investment in ZipperTax.

Current solutions offered to the tax community have limitations:

• Trouble with ongoing tax support

• Difficulty finding credentialed professionals

• Challenging to stay up to date on legislative changes

• Timely to get mundane tasks completed

The challenges felt by both the tax professional and the taxpayer are remedied by ZipperTax’s 3-product offering. Portal is ZipperTax’s initial product to get an understanding on the tax payer which expedites the onboarding process. The data gathered on the customer is pushed into the matchmaker product of which tax professionals and taxpayers are matched to ensure the taxpayer’s needs are appropriately addressed by the professional with expertise in the particular area.

Jack Mao, CEO and Founder, is a Stanford undergrad student. He impressed the Honors Fund team as a true jack of all trades — showcasing both strong technical and sales skills — giving our team confidence in his ability to run ZipperTax as a single founder. Despite Jack being in undergrad, he has 5+years working in the tax industry and 7+years coding secure web apps. Jack solo-founded a high-performing mid-sized IRS VITA tax clinic at Stanford. Through this effort, Jack realized the industry was so disparate in the resources provided due tax payers and professionals alike despite being such an intricate system. Jack set out to build an AI co-pilot for these 2 parties starting with the tax professionals’ network. Within the tax professionals’ community, Jack plans to target professionals helping college students which is a group understood by Jack as he spent time serving this subset. Jack’s mission is to make tax savings accessible to all and he finds the college student subset to be a strong starting point as their needs are niche and have been traditionally overlooked.

With ZipperTax, we see the potential to automate legacy systems to better support the complex tax industry, driving tangible results to all parties affected. Honors Fund strongly believes in Jack and his vision to make a positive impact on the tax industry as a whole by making tax advice more accessible to underserved communities.