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Building Kintsugi: From Facebook Engineer to Sales Tax Automation Founder

Most technical founders don’t dream about building tax compliance software. But when Pujun Bhatnagar’s father—who spent 37 years in compliance and taxation—warned him about an upcoming Supreme Court case that could have “an earth shattering effect on how sales tax is handled today,” Pujun started paying attention.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Pujun Bhatnagar, CEO and Co-Founder of Kintsugi, a sales tax automation platform that’s raised over $8 million, shared how he went from Facebook engineer to taking on the 800-pound gorilla in the sales tax space—and winning.

The Supreme Court Case That Changed Everything

The 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair ruling fundamentally transformed sales tax compliance in America. “Prior to 2018, the way to think about sales tax was charged based on where you were headquartered,” Pujun explains. But everything changed when the Supreme Court sided with South Dakota, ruling that sales tax liability now depends on who’s buying your product, not where you’re located.

The impact was immediate and massive. “By November of 2019, 48 jurisdictions including DC and Puerto Rico had passed regulations around whether or not people should collect sales tax,” Pujun notes. This created chaos for D2C businesses, e-commerce companies, and even B2B and B2C SaaS companies—all of whom suddenly had to navigate a complex web of sales tax obligations across dozens of jurisdictions.

But here’s the kicker: “Sales tax has now become the number one driver of revenue for local governments,” Pujun reveals. While property tax was the primary funding source for local projects in the 1990s and early 2000s, political pressures around raising property taxes pushed jurisdictions to double down on sales tax instead. Today, nearly 60% of local governments cite sales tax as their number one revenue source.

Why Leave Facebook for Sales Tax?

For most people, leaving a stable, lucrative position at Facebook to start a tax compliance company would seem insane. But Pujun’s decision-making framework was different. “I just felt that I was not meeting my potential by staying at these companies,” he shares, quickly adding: “I’m not saying this as a feather in my cap, but I feel like I’m just built differently.”

His reasoning came down to regret minimization. “I really worried about the opportunity cost of if I were not to take this step, would I regret it if I was on my deathbed?” Pujun explains. The calculus was simple: “Facebook is not going anywhere. All these FAANG companies are not going anywhere. If I were to fail, I can always come back. But what kept me up at night is if I do not take the plunge, I will regret it.”

That combination—deep domain expertise from his father, technical chops from Facebook, and market timing around Avalara’s struggles—created what Pujun saw as a unique unlock. “I’m a data guy. I’ve already worked at Facebook for five plus years. I know how to build these systems. My unique unlock was I have a unique advantage because my dad has worked in the space, plus my technical ability.”

The 300-Interview Validation Process

The first three to six months? “A lot of chaos in the best way possible,” Pujun admits. After quitting Facebook and moving to MIT, where he met his co-founder Barkin, the focus became relentless customer discovery. “We had this massive spreadsheet of 15 adjacent ideas that we wanted to build in. And we just did, I think, 300 to 500 interviews to essentially figure out what we wanted to build.”

This methodical approach paid off when Jeff Gibson, a second-time founder who had spearheaded data platforms at Atlassian, became involved. “Atlassian had done a massive integration with Avalara and then for his previous startup, Monetize Now, he had talked to all the competitors in the space,” Pujun notes. Jeff eventually became the third co-founder, bringing critical insights about where the market gaps existed.

Flipping the Script on Sales Tax Compliance

The research revealed something crucial: every player in the market—including Avalara—was “caught with their pants down” after the regulatory changes. Most competitors operated like agencies, “where they programmatically pull in the data and then they ship the data out to India, Vietnam, Philippines.” This services-heavy model meant onboarding took two to three weeks.

Kintsugi’s insight? Build a sales tax engine powered by AI that could show liability and exposure “with three clicks and three minutes.” The contrast is stark: “We are the only software in the space which actually has a get started button on the website and where people can actually, seven clicks or three minutes, they can get onboarded and see their sales tax liability within ten minutes without talking to a sales personnel.”

This product-led growth approach worked because the team uncovered a critical pain point: businesses using Shopify and Stripe would turn on sales tax collection and “erroneously think that these different e-commerce or ERP platforms were filing sales tax for them. But all that was happening in the background was they were just collecting sales tax and they were really sitting on a massive liability.”

Building Trust in a Trust-Deficit Category

For a startup handling tax compliance, building trust is existential. Pujun’s philosophy? “Trust is something that is not just built and forgotten, it is something just like success. It’s always rented and you have to prove that you deserve people’s trust day in, day out.”

Kintsugi implemented several mechanisms to earn and maintain that trust. First, transparency: “Everything that we show on the website can be exported by a click of a button into a CSV that any CPA can audit.” Second, accountability: “We offer what is called the Kintsugi guarantee for all our premium clients that if by any chance, if we show the wrong value, then we cover sales tax penalties up to the contract value.”

Third, and perhaps most importantly, financial transparency. “While other companies withdraw money from your bank account three weeks prior to making your sales tax payments, we believe in transparency through and through,” Pujun explains. “We show each and every transaction on a jurisdiction level how much we paid to each jurisdiction and it comes out of their direct bank account. So we do not sit on that pile of cash.”

The Grind That Nobody Talks About

The company name itself—Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold—carries dual meaning. Professionally, it represents bringing together fragmented revenue data across different platforms to compute accurate sales tax. “Businesses oftentimes have omni channel sales. So they might be doing wholesale sales, they might be selling on Shopify, they might be selling on different avenues as well.”

But personally? “Building this company was perhaps the hardest thing that I have done in my life,” Pujun admits. “I don’t think a lot of founders talk about how lonely and how hard the journey is. Where at a time I felt, especially for the first two years when I was working on this, and it was just the founders where I was broken and I had to put pieces of my life together.”

The timeline reflects this grind: started in September 2021, incorporated in December 2022, raised pre-seed in September 2023. But here’s the crucial detail: “In the two years leading to the pre seed fundraising, I was doing sales tax by hand for ten different companies just so that I could understand really the ins and outs of what needed to be built.”

Fundraising Through Crisis

The fundraising journey had its own challenges. “When we were first fundraising, SVB collapsed. And that was an experience that I don’t wish on my worst enemies,” Pujun recalls. His advice for founders? “You should always keep four to six months budgeted where at least one of the co-founders would be devoting 100% of their time to it.”

The patience paid off dramatically. The team only started writing “our first line of scalable code after pre seed fundraising. Before that was all MVP.” But because they took the time to deeply understand the problem space, the results speak for themselves: “Ever since we were publicly available, we have been doubling in revenue month over month.”

After raising Series A in March/April, Kintsugi recently secured additional funding “at two x the valuation of what we raised our Series A at.” The company went from three people to 47 in ten months and has “quadrupled in revenue ever since we raised our Series A.”

The Path to Unicorn Status

Looking ahead three to five years, Pujun’s vision is clear: “I want Kintsugi to be a unicorn and more.” But it’s not just about the valuation. “Every person that has chosen to join Kintsugi, I will always be eternally thankful from the bottom of my heart,” he shares.

His vision for company culture ties back to the Kintsugi name: “I want to build a culture where by working at Kintsugi, people are bringing pieces of them together and going on this healing journey and building something that is bigger than the sum of their parts.”

For founders navigating the messy middle of startup building—the period between launching and scaling—Pujun’s journey offers a blueprint: find a massive regulatory shift creating chaos, spend years deeply understanding the problem through hands-on work, build with AI and automation where competitors use manual processes, and prioritize transparency and trust above short-term revenue extraction.

The sales tax market might not be sexy, but with the right timing, team, and execution, even compliance software can become a rocket ship.