Rulen Raises €1.8 Million to Automate Italy’s Junior Tax Work

Rulen has raised €1.8 million to automate the junior tax work Italian firms can no longer staff. The Milan company, launched in late 2025 as LexSA, is dropping that name as it tries to move from a research assistant to software that runs filing workflows end to end.

The first round was led by VC Partners, with Growth Engine, AME Ventures, Zest through its Magic Mind vehicle, Alpha Venture and a group of industry angels. The cheque lands 91 days after Italy’s Revenue Agency opened the Cassetto Fiscale, the online taxpayer drawer, to machine-to-machine pulls.

Rulen Raises €1.8 Million Under a New Name

Simone Hong, co-founder and chief executive, said the firm was built because studios could not find junior staff and because seniors still spent their days on repetitive admin. Claudio Cama, co-founder and chief technology officer, said the next step is agents that execute tasks on their own so the licensed professional only takes the calls that need a human.

Our goal is to make AI adoption simple, concrete and scalable. With this round and the move to Rulen, we want to accelerate our transformation from assistant to agentic platform, capable of automating end-to-end workflows without professionals losing control and verifiability.

Simone Hong, co-founder and CEO of Rulen

Stefano Siglienti, managing partner at VC Partners, said tax and tributary advice is a complex field where professionals still lack vertical AI tools built to sit inside the systems they already use. He said the fund would put operating help behind sales and hiring, not only capital.

The product, in the company’s telling, plugs into software firms already run and into third-party systems, including the Cassetto Fiscale, so a practice can move from data collection through review and out to finished documents without a junior doing the clicks. Customers already include law and tax firms, specialist boutiques, groups that buy up studios, and multinational companies, Rulen said, without publishing a headcount.

Hong came out of tax practice. Cama is a software engineer. That mix is the pitch: domain people who could not hire the next intake, so they wrote software that copies what that intake used to do.

Young Commercialisti Are Now 15.8% of the Register

Italy’s commercialisti are earning more and getting older at the same time. The Fondazione Nazionale di Ricerca dei Commercialisti, in its 2026 synthesis of the Albo, counted 119,050 names on the register at the end of 2025, 902 fewer than a year earlier, a 0.8% drop.

New names on the register fell to 1,494 from 1,958. That is 464 fewer enrolments, a 23.7% drop in a single year. People aged 40 and under slipped to 15.8% of the Albo from 16.5% in 2024 and from 29.0% in 2008. People aged 60 and over are now 29.7%. The middle band, 40 to 60, is 54.5%. Women hold at 34.0%.

THE 2025 COMMERCIALISTI REGISTER

Mean pay rose 8.3% to €87,376, up €6,728, and 7.3% after inflation, the first time real income has cleared its pre-crisis mark. The median is €48,420, only 55.4% of the mean, so the lift is uneven. Società tra professionisti, the corporate form used by firms that want to scale past a single nameplate, reached 2,142, up 181, or 9.3%.

Trainees are the one young figure that turned up. The registro dei praticanti rose 4.2% to 11,507, the first increase in years, with the South up 8.5%, the North 2.4% and the Centre 0.7%. More people are starting the path. Fewer are putting their names on the Albo when the path ends.

The split inside the country is ugly in a quieter way. Under-40s are 19.4% of the Albo in the North and 12.1% in the South. The register itself fell 0.2% in the North, 1% in the Centre and 1.3% in the South. The Chamber of Deputies on 23 September 2026 approved a bill that would let students finish the 18-month traineeship during a master’s degree, a state attempt to shorten the wait. Rulen’s product does something else. It does the waiting-room work.

How the Tax Drawer Became a Machine Feed

Italy’s Revenue Agency on 6 July 2026 set the rules for software to pull taxpayer files in bulk, and on 22 July it switched on the first live feed, mass download of Certificazioni Uniche for tax years 2024 and 2025. That order, protocol 200918, puts the Cassetto Fiscale on the same kind of pipe a payroll system already uses, so a firm no longer has to click through the web drawer client by client.

The legal hook is article 23 of legislative decree 1 of 2024, which told the Agency to let taxpayers and their delegated intermediaries take data, acts and notices, including collection rolls tied to Agency assessments, in structured form. The technical hook is older: an API management platform the Agency stood up on 4 April 2023. What changed in July is that the drawer stopped being only a website.

THE PATH FROM DRAWER TO FEED

1. 4 April 2023: The Revenue Agency activates its API management platform for machine services.
2. 8 January 2024: Legislative decree 1/2024 orders a richer Cassetto Fiscale, including bulk structured transfers.
3. 6 July 2026: Director’s order 200918 sets the API rules for intermediaries on Entratel and Fisconline.
4. 22 July 2026: The first live service lets intermediaries pull Certificazioni Uniche for 2024 and 2025 in bulk.
5. 21 October 2026: Rulen, formerly LexSA, announces the €1.8 million round and the rebrand.

Until that feed existed, an “assistant” could summarise a rule or draft a memo. It could not, on its own, empty a client’s drawer, line the certificates up, and push a file through the rest of the job. The company’s own language shifted with the pipe: LexSA was an assistant; Rulen is supposed to be an agent. Control and a paper trail stay with the licensed person, Hong said, because a wrong filing still has a human name on it.

Tax is a bad market for a generic chatbot and a good one for this kind of tool. Everyone with a VAT number already files. The state already holds the source documents. The work repeats on a calendar. That is a tighter wedge than an all-purpose helper, and it is why a seed cheque this size can be aimed at one country’s code instead of at “knowledge work.”

The Big Software Houses Already Ship Assistants

Rulen is not walking into an empty shop. The Italian accounting software market is still a fight among domestic suites that already talk to the tax office, and those suites have been bolting on model-driven features of their own.

WHAT THE INCUMBENTS ALREADY SHIP

• Zucchetti Ago Infinity: Pulls invoices, till receipts, F24s, VAT credits and land-registry data from the Agency, then suggests postings and matches bank lines.
• Wolters Kluwer Genya: A declarations assistant launched in March 2026 that the company said about 2,500 professional firms used in the first 60 days, sending almost 50,000 queries, plus conversational search and automated bank reconciliation.
• TeamSystem and Fatture in Cloud: Public APIs and XML import paths that already sit under thousands of Italian ledgers, which is why a new agent has to plug in rather than replace the books.
• The Agency itself: The Cassetto API catalogue, which any Entratel intermediary can switch on, so the data pipe is not a startup exclusive.

Zucchetti’s 2025 professionals observatory, published with its own AI tools for commercialisti, found that 84% of firms saw a positive effect from AI, 63% of them as time saved. That is the incumbent’s survey, sold next to the incumbent’s product. It still tells you the buyer already believes the pitch. Siglienti’s claim that the profession lacks vertical tools built for existing flows is a funder’s line. The gap Rulen is actually chasing is narrower: not “does AI exist in the suite,” but “does the suite run the junior’s whole job without a new hire.”

A research assistant lives in a chat box. An agent has to write back into TeamSystem, Zucchetti or the Agency and leave a trail a partner can defend. That is a harder product, and it is the one the rebrand is meant to describe.

Roll-Up Firms Buy the Junior They Cannot Hire

Rulen lists consolidators of professional firms among its users for a reason. A roll-up that has just bought three small studios inherits three different ledgers, three Cassetto habits, and no spare 28-year-olds. Società tra professionisti grew 9.3% in 2025 because that is the wrapper those deals use. Software that collects, reviews and emits documents without a proportional hire is how a roll-up makes the maths work.

The remaining seniors are the other buyer. Mean income at €87,376, with the top of the distribution far above the median of €48,420, is what a thinning pyramid looks like in cash. People who stayed are taking more work. People who might have joined are looking at 18 months of traineeship and a pile of drawer-clicking, then going somewhere else. Automating the pile makes the seniors richer. It also removes the chores that used to train the next partner.

Smaller studios in the South, where under-40s are already 12.1% of the Albo and the register fell 1.3%, are the ones least able to buy a new platform and least able to replace a retiring name. The product does not have to put them out of business to change the map. It only has to make the consolidator next door faster.

The Cheque Goes on Sales, Product and Tax Specialists

Rulen said it will spend the round on product and on a sales push, and that it wants about 10 new people in by the end of 2026, with sales and marketing first. It also wants more tax specialists on the payroll, the human check that Hong keeps promising will not go away.

That hire list is the whole bet in miniature. The company is staffing a go-to-market team and a review bench so it can sell a machine that does the bench’s old work. If the Cassetto feed widens past Certificazioni Uniche, the agent gets more of the year. If the Albo keeps losing young names, the buyer’s alternative to the agent stays a person who is not there.

The juniors who still sign the traineeship register will learn on a smaller set of tasks, next to software that already does the rest. Rulen’s seed is a small cheque. The swap it is paying for is the larger one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Rulen, Formerly Called LexSA?

Rulen is a Milan tax-and-accounting software company founded in 2025. It shipped a first assistant under the LexSA name, with an MVP out in July 2025, then rebranded as it tried to move from answers in a chat box to workflows that collect data, draft papers and leave a log a professional can check.

How Do Italian Tax Agents Connect to Cassetto Fiscale APIs?

Delegated intermediaries already on Entratel or Fisconline open the Agency’s reserved area, pick a service from the interoperability catalogue, accept the terms, and download credentials that include a client-secret for their gestionale. The first live service, switched on 22 July 2026, is bulk download of Certificazioni Uniche for 2024 and 2025; new feeds are announced as the Agency adds them.

How Many Commercialisti Are on the Italian Register?

The Albo held 107,499 names at the end of 2007 and 119,050 at the end of 2025, a rise of 11,551, or 10.7%, over 18 years. The long climb has reversed in the last two years even as the country still has 496 residents per enrolled commercialista, down from 555, so the profession is older, not thinner on the ground in the way a simple headcount suggests.

Who Are Rulen’s Founders?

Simone Hong, chief executive, is a tax adviser who worked in digital tax teams at the law firm Chiomenti and at Deloitte and who built a practitioners’ community, ICPN, from five people to about 1,800. Claudio Cama, chief technology officer, is a software engineer with more than six years in startups and a lead instructor in AI and big-data courses at ITS Rizzoli.