muntiva: tax software for Switzerland
A startup concept from the capstone project of my MBA at HSG: a tool that reads tax documents with OCR and an LLM and prepares the tax return. It was meant to show how something like this could work in Switzerland. It was stopped because taxes are regulated by the cantons.
Stopped. Capstone project in my MBA, July 2026.
The idea
muntiva was meant to automate the Swiss tax return: upload documents, read them with OCR and an LLM, map them to the cantonal form and submit directly. The goal was twenty minutes instead of three to five hours by hand.
The problem
Switzerland is digitalising the back end with cantonal portals, eCH standards and electronic tax statements from banks. For taxpayers, filling in the return has barely changed. The system change adds roughly 1.7 million returns, about a third more. Nobody owns the automated, cross-cantonal experience from documents to a submitted return.
How I tested it
I tested three assumptions with a survey (59 participants), an interview with an incumbent's CEO, five interviews with private individuals and three with fiduciaries. The need was there, as long as Swiss data hosting, an official connection and liability are settled. Among private customers 54% would pay, about 95% of them less than CHF 100, in competition with free cantonal tools. Among fiduciaries 4 of 5 wanted to use the solution, at CHF 2 to 10 per return. The pivot followed: fiduciaries first.
Why it was stopped
In Switzerland, taxes are a matter for the cantons. Each canton decides for itself how and by whom tax returns may be submitted, so standardisation across Switzerland is currently not possible. On top of that, the interfaces are not public: only accredited software companies get access, and you would have to adapt elements and the interface canton by canton. With 26 different cantonal systems, that does not scale.
What the project showed
The capstone project in my MBA clearly supported the hypothesis: a solution that scales across Switzerland is not viable today. That is a result too. I could show what such an offer would look like in Switzerland and where exactly it fails. That is why I did not pursue muntiva as tax software.