Today, our first portfolio company L3i is in market. L3i is an AI-powered sales tax advisory platform for accounting firms. It handles the work that traditionally takes staff hours of spreadsheets and manual processes: nexus studies, product taxability analyses, exposure studies, VDA workpapers, and SUT audit workpapers.
Sales tax advisory work sits at an awkward intersection: too critical to ignore, too tedious to enjoy, too varied across jurisdictions to fully automate with traditional rules engines. Modern models change that calculus. L3i pairs domain-specific reasoning with the structured workflows accounting firms already use, automating the work that doesn't need human judgment and surfacing the work that does.
Why now
Advisory work like this is exactly the kind of problem AI is good at: structured inputs, well-defined outputs, repetitive at scale, and full of edge cases that benefit from contextual reasoning. L3i is built to handle that work end-to-end, automating what doesn't need human judgment and surfacing what does.
Pricing for outcomes, not seats
L3i doesn't charge by the seat. It charges for the work done: every nexus study, every taxability analysis, every workpaper produced. Per-seat pricing made sense when software was a tool humans used. It makes less sense when the software is doing the work.
This is the end of SaaS as we knew it. The customers benefiting most from AI-native software are the ones with the smallest seat count and the largest output. Think of the firm handling a hundred clients with a five-person team, not the firm with fifty accountants. Charging them per-seat would charge them less the more value they get. So we don't.
The model is simple: pay for what you need, what gets delivered, what the AI actually does. Outcome-based, work-based, value-based, but not seat-based. L3i is the first of our companies built on this thesis. It won't be the last.
Where we go from here
L3i was built and is run in-house at 1904 Labs by a small team, on a fraction of the capital a company like this used to take. Today it's in market with paying customers and a growing list of accounting firms onboarding. Next: grow revenue, deepen partnerships across the accounting ecosystem, and keep building a business that's worth owning.
Learn more at l3i.ai.