The Story of Kintsugi: The Company Building the Future of Sales Tax Compliance

The Story of Kintsugi: The Company Building the Future of Sales Tax Compliance

September 2021. Pujun Bhatnagar sat in a pub in Birmingham, UK, facing a decision that would define the next chapter of his life. He’d just quit a comfortable job at Facebook, turned down the traditional Silicon Valley path, and was now staring at a spreadsheet with 15 different business ideas. Most founders would pick the sexiest option—something in AI, crypto, or social. Pujun chose sales tax.

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 the full story of how a Stanford graduate student with a taxation expert father built a company that’s now doubling revenue month-over-month. This is that story.

The Father’s Warning

Some founders discover problems through personal pain. Others stumble into opportunities. Pujun had something different: a 37-year head start.

“My dad built a career in compliance and taxation and really worked in the space for 37 years before retiring,” Pujun explains. “And ever since this case was taken to Supreme Court, he was like, ‘Pujun, you should really keep an eye out on this, because if South Dakota wins, this could have, quote unquote, an earth shattering effect on how sales tax is handled today.'”

His father was right. The 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair ruling didn’t just change sales tax compliance—it detonated the entire industry. Overnight, thousands of businesses that never thought about sales tax suddenly had obligations across 48 jurisdictions. The old model of charging sales tax based on where you’re headquartered vanished. Now it mattered where your customers lived.

“By November of 2019, 48 jurisdictions including DC and Puerto Rico had passed regulations,” Pujun notes. The incumbent—Avalara, the 800-pound gorilla—was “caught with their pants down.” Vista Equity would eventually take them private in 2022, but the damage was done. A massive hole had opened in the market.

The Unique Unlock

Most founders would see that hole and rush to fill it. Pujun did the opposite. He got his hands dirty.

“I was a data guy. I’ve already worked at Facebook for five plus years. I know how to build these systems,” he explains. “My unique unlock was I have a unique advantage because my dad has worked in the space, plus my technical ability of building these large systems. So I decided to marry them together.”

But marriage takes time. After leaving Facebook and landing at MIT, where he met his co-founder Barkin, Pujun embarked on what most would consider startup suicide: he spent two years not building product. Instead, “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.”

Two years. Ten companies. Manual tax filings. No MVP, no beta, no early customers. Just pure immersion into every edge case and pain point in sales tax compliance.

The customer discovery was equally methodical. “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.”

The Chaos of Building

Ask Pujun about the first three to six months, and he’ll tell you honestly: “It was a lot of chaos in the best way possible.”

That chaos led to clarity. The third co-founder, Jeff Gibson—a second-time founder who’d spearheaded data platforms at Atlassian—became a crucial guide. “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 shares. Those insights helped the team understand exactly where the gaps were.

The insight they landed on was simple but devastating to competitors: everyone else operated like an agency. “They programmatically pull in the data and then they ship the data out to India, Vietnam, Philippines,” Pujun explains. “While there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s very much a services kind of business.”

Kintsugi’s bet? “We are going to build a sales tax engine that is empowered by AI, where with three clicks and three minutes, we’ll be able to show your sales tax liability and exposure versus our other competitors in the space. They take two to three weeks to just onboard a customer.”

The contrast became their moat. “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.”

The Breaking Point

Behind every company name is a story. Kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold—carries two meanings for Pujun.

Professionally, it represents bringing together fragmented revenue data. “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,” he explains. Kintsugi joins those pieces together to compute accurate sales tax.

Personally? The name cuts deeper.

“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 in order to bring this company into its current form.”

The timeline bears this out. Started September 2021. Incorporated December 2022. Raised pre-seed September 2023. “We started writing really our first line of scalable code after pre seed fundraising. Before that was all MVP.”

The patience was strategic, but it required sacrifice. When fundraising finally began, SVB collapsed. “And that was an experience that I don’t wish on my worst enemies,” Pujun recalls.

The Inflection Point

Sometimes patience compounds into velocity.

“Ever since we were publicly available, we have been doubling in revenue month over month,” Pujun shares. The company raised Series A in March/April and “very recently we have more cash injection coming in at two x the valuation of what we raised our Series A at.”

The team exploded from three to 47 in ten months. Revenue quadrupled since the Series A. The long grind of doing manual tax work, conducting hundreds of interviews, and building the right product foundation was paying off exponentially.

The Future: Beyond Unicorn Status

Looking three to five years out, Pujun’s ambition is clear but goes beyond just valuation.

“I want Kintsugi to be a unicorn and more,” he states. But the vision extends to culture and legacy. “I want the people who are involved in this journey of building Kintsugi as something that they are proud of their legacy.”

His gratitude runs deep. “Every person that has chosen to join Kintsugi, I will always be eternally thankful from the bottom of my heart.” The company name’s dual meaning comes full circle in his vision for the team: “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 the immediate future—the next twelve months—the focus is operationally straightforward: “How do we ten x our revenue, if not more?” That means hiring aggressively across sales, operations, and customer support. “We are focused on is getting and building that team of Avengers who can take this product to the next level.”

The market timing couldn’t be better. Sales tax has become the number one revenue driver for local governments, with nearly 60% citing it as their primary funding source. More jurisdictions will come online. More businesses will face compliance requirements. The regulatory complexity that created Kintsugi’s opportunity will only intensify.

And unlike competitors running service businesses, Kintsugi built actual software. “We spend, I think, 65% to 70% in R and D,” Pujun notes—an investment that enables exponential scaling rather than linear growth.

The story of Kintsugi is ultimately a story about patience and precision. While others rush to market with good-enough solutions, Pujun spent two years understanding the problem at a depth no competitor could match. While others built agencies, he built software. While others optimized for short-term revenue, he optimized for long-term trust and transparency.

Now, with product-market fit proven and capital in the bank, the next chapter begins. From broken pottery to unicorn status—joined together with gold.