The past year was a rollercoaster, no matter where you sit in the startup ecosystem. But the highs that Boast’s customers—and our own team—enjoyed throughout 2023 made every second of the ride worthwhile.
More innovation tax credits dispersed than ever before
For starters, more than 1,100 Boast customers got back a whopping $263,000,000 in innovation tax credits from both the United States and Canadian governments this year.
Best of all? We brought more businesses into the Boast community this year, as we worked on claims for 256 new customers in both the US and Canada.
A force multiplier for accessing US tax credits
“To date Boast has helped us net hundreds of thousands of dollars in refunds,” Drew Jacob, Head of Finance for Truv, says regarding Boast’s United States R&D tax credit services.
“We got a 5x return—that is, $5 back for every dollar we spent working with Boast,” Drew adds, emphasizing that Boast’s team drove the entire tax claim process in a helpful and impactful way.
An extension of the team for Canadian startups
“I feel like Boast is an extended part of my team,” explains Mehrsa Raeiszadeh, Co-founder and COO of Mintlist.
“It was similar to the work that I would do for my PhD,” says Mehrsa of attempting to go SR&ED alone, emphasizing that just compiling the payroll data and pulling in her technical teams could amount to at least a 10 hour project for numerous individuals.
For the third year in a row now, Boast has helped Mehrsa take home “big fat checks” to help recoup her team’s R&D investments and continue driving innovation.
Growing partnerships across startup ecosystem
Along with helping more customers capture R&D tax credits than ever before, we’ve also embarked on a wealth of new partnerships over the past year with leaders across the North American startup ecosystem.
This includes strengthening ties with accelerators and incubator programs, including FounderFuel, Volta and Foresight Canada—to name a few—and startup service providers like VanHack and Goodlawyer to foment a powerful community of resources for the founders we support.
This resulted in a resurgence of our presence attending and sponsoring in-person events across the US and Canada, from the banner Collision Conference in Toronto back in June, SaaStr in San Francisco this past August, and even local happy hours everywhere from Boston to Dallas to Vancouver.
It’s also sparked a wealth of new digital events, including a webinar series with our partners from Arctech Accelerate, Omnisync and StartupStack, and learning sessions with the folks at YEDI.
A wealth of assets to support a growing community
This year also marked the launch of our What The Tech podcast series, which has featured interviews with customers and stakeholders across the tech space sharing their founders stories and strategies for startup success.
Supporting the almost 30 podcast episodes (and counting) has been a wealth of new guides offering strategies for startup teams on both sides of the border, including:
For US
- Guide to Qualified Research Activities
- The Ultimate Guide to R&D Tax Credits [2023]
- eBook: United States R&E Amortization & Capitalization Rules Explained [2023]
For Canada
- The Ultimate Guide to Non-Dilutive Funding in Canada
- Guide to Innovation Funding for Atlantic Canada
- A Strategic Guide to Successful SR&ED Negotiation
For All
- How to Map a Successful R&D Strategy
- Lifecycle of a Startup Guide
- eBook: How to Use AI for R&D
- eBook: 2023 R&D Trends & Insights Report
- eBook: Hiring a CFO to Scale your Startup
AI-driven enhancements make Boast more powerful, effective than ever
We’ve also embarked on one of the most rapid periods of product growth since Boast’s inception, as we’ve rolled out a slew of new features in 2023 aimed at streamlining the process for capturing innovation funding and optimizing R&D.
As a result, Boast is now poised to offer more than just maximum access to tax credits to support R&D, but a system of intelligence to help product, finance and R&D teams work smarter.
Boast’s AI Classifier, for instance, was developed to reshape your R&D claim experience. It seamlessly categorizes your projects employing an advanced algorithm to precisely map each task to its corresponding R&D project. This provides SMEs with swift claim processing and impeccable audit-ready records, even providing a confidence score assigned to gauge claim accuracy to underscore the AI Classifier’s precision.
We’re going to continue embarking on product enhancements that build upon our core mission to be a global leader in driving innovation by providing access to both capital and R&D systems of intelligence.
Soon, we’ll be unveiling our Claims Insights feature, which will give teams the ability to dig deeper into their R&D tax credit eligibility by breaking down expenditures on a project-level, categorizing them into salaries, subcontractors, materials, and overhead. The goal is to deliver key insights on optimizing the claim and maximizing eligible expenditure based on various scenarios, enabling teams to take a more proactive approach to their R&D workflow mapping.
From there, expect even more features that arm teams with the insights they need to work more intelligently than ever. This includes Invoice Management functionality as well as a Live Claims Estimator that will allow teams to know in real-time the state of their return.
Today, existing Boast clients can also enjoy QuickFund Pre-Approval, which enables SR&ED-eligible CCPCs to tap into a portion of their annual SR&ED refund on a quarterly basis throughout the year (that is, before claims are ever filed). With this funding in hand, your team can enjoy non-dilutive cash flow that minimizes your cost of capital, all while optimizing your capital structure in the process.
Behind it all, a team with unmatched expertise
While AI is driving the next chapter of Boast’s technological evolution, it’s the unmatched expertise in navigating both tax codes and the startup ecosystem that has made us such invaluable partners to the world’s most innovative founders.
Take our own VP of Customer Success Matt Funk, who in the past 15 years with Boast has clocked more 25,000 hours of applied SRED mastery.
In that same vein, members across our Customer Success and Customer Delivery teams have punched higher-than-ever in 2023 to help our customers succeed.
This includes:
- Dae from our Customer Delivery team is almost on track to file more than 100 claims for US customers, breaking an individual and company record!
- When it comes to defending our Canadian clients against often unavoidable audits, our team has an ITC recovery rate of almost 93 percent so far for SR&ED customers.
- Yankel, Akhya, and Vats on our Canadian Customer Delivery Team have beat their individual goals, each topping 40 claims successfully filed for customers this year.
- “The biggest surprise of working with Boast was how good the backup was. That report that we got at the end of the process was awesome,” says Walker Vanos of PeopleReign, who leverages Boast to help U.S. customers capture R&D tax credits.
As we close another great year helping businesses tap into the true value of their R&D, we can’t thank you—the members of our extended community—enough for having the bravery and brainpower to continue driving world-changing innovation.
If you aren’t leveraging R&D tax credits to help extend your innovation runway, talk to an expert from Boast today to learn more.
