Most tax advice arrives too late to matter. That’s the premise behind Gelt, the Miami-based firm Tal Binder founded in 2023 after a large liquidity event at a previous company left him with a bad outcome—even though he’d hired a top-tier firm to handle it. The system, he concluded, is built to report on decisions rather than shape them. By the time the conversation happens, the money has already moved.

Gelt’s answer is a narrow one: income tax only, no bookkeeping or adjacent services, aimed initially at professional service owners and real estate investors. That focus has paid off—the company recently closed a $13 million Series A. In the following interview, Binder discusses how he tested demand before building the product, why minimizing the number isn’t the same as optimizing the outcome and why he thinks the industry is wrong about both AI and the death of the partnership model.

What insight or experience ultimately led you to start Gelt?

Before Gelt, I went through a large liquidity event in a previous company, and even though I worked with a top-tier tax firm, I still ended up with a very bad tax outcome. That was a turning point for me.

I didn’t grow up understanding money or taxes. You assume the experts know what they’re doing and that they’ll guide you the right way. What I realized, too late, is that the system is very reactive. By the time you’re talking to accountants about structure and strategy, most of the important decisions have already been made. You’re not really optimizing, you’re just reporting.

That experience bothered me a lot. I’m the kind of person that, once something doesn’t make sense, I go very deep into it. I started reading the tax code, trying to understand how these outcomes actually happen, and it became clear that taxes are not about forms, they’re about planning ahead of time. That’s really where Gelt came from.

It was a combination of frustration and curiosity. I realized that if I, as someone technical and motivated, could end up in that position, then a lot of people are probably dealing with the same thing. And the core issue is that they’re not being supported proactively. So the idea was simple. Build something that shifts taxes from reactive to proactive, and gives people clarity before decisions are made, not after.

What gaps in the traditional tax system made you believe there was an opportunity to build something different?

The biggest gap I saw was how reactive the system is structured. Most people deal with taxes at tax time, when there’s very little left to actually change. At that point, it’s mostly filing. But the outcomes are driven by decisions made much earlier, and there’s no real framework to guide people through that in real time.

Another issue is how optimization is defined. It’s usually framed as paying the least amount of taxes possible, but that’s not always the right goal. You can push that very far and technically reduce taxes, but you end up adding complexity, cost in terms of both time and money, and risk that don’t make sense. Real optimization is about making the right tradeoffs, not just minimizing a number.

And then there’s personalization. The tax code is nuanced, but the experience people get is often very standardized. People hear about strategies from others and try to apply them without context, even though their situation is completely different. When you look at all of that together, the issue isn’t really access to information. It’s how and when that information is applied.

That’s where we saw the opportunity. If you can make taxes proactive and relationship-driven, and actually tailor it to the individual, you can materially change the outcome.

Since launching in 2023, Gelt has grown quickly and recently secured $13 million in Series A funding. What were the biggest strategic decisions you made early on that helped position the company for that growth?

If I had to point to what drove the early growth, it was a few very deliberate decisions around focus, who we serve, and how quickly we validated demand. We narrowed in on income tax and ignored everything else. No bookkeeping, no accounting, no adjacent services. It’s a complex enough problem on its own, so going deep made more sense than trying to cover too much.

We also focused on a very specific type of client, mainly professional service business owners and people in real estate. That’s where we understand the problems well and where we can actually provide an advantage. We’re not trying to solve this for everyone, though we have since broadened our audience a bit.

The other big piece was how early we pushed for real demand. Before we had a full product or even a full team, we ran a campaign around tax optimization to see if people actually cared about what we were building. We got hundreds of inbound submissions. Most of them weren’t relevant, but that wasn’t the point.

We filtered down to a small group, around 10 to 20 clients, and started working with them immediately. At that stage, we didn’t even have everything built internally—we hired and built as we went, based on what those clients actually needed.

That process gave us very fast feedback. What people are willing to say they want is one thing, what they’re willing to pay for is something else entirely. Once we saw that people were committing and staying, it gave us conviction that we were solving a real problem. From there, it was just about continuing to focus and scaling what was already working, instead of constantly changing direction.

As you look ahead, what’s next for Gelt?

We’re doubling down on AI and people, not AI instead of people. There’s a lot of noise right now about replacing financial professionals with AI. I think that’s fundamentally wrong for our segment of the market. In a space like taxes, people are not just paying for an answer. They’re paying for context, judgment and a relationship.

We use AI heavily across the company. It’s a core part of how we operate. But it’s a tool. You need to know when to use it and when not to. The value comes from combining that with people who understand the client and can actually apply it correctly.

The other thing we’re building toward is a more partnership-driven model for our tax team. The industry is moving toward consolidation and moving away from the traditional partnership model, where large PE firms are trying to centralize everything and reduce the role of individuals. I think that misses the point.

We want to do the opposite. Empower the people doing the work, give them better tools and align incentives so they benefit from the value they create for our clients. If you increase productivity with technology and keep the relationship strong, everyone wins.

That’s really the direction. Strong relationships, supported by technology, with a model that actually rewards the people creating the value.