Corina Popov Is Making Tax Digital For Sole Traders Across The EU

Corina Popov spent 15 years as a financial accountant, moving between industry and practice and working mostly with large companies in sectors such as property management and fashion. Her last role was leading the accounts team at one of the world’s top game development companies, with a heavy focus on global revenue recognition and tax, and on automating as much of that work as possible.

Outside of her work, Corina was already doing tax returns for her husband and for the sole traders in their wider circle of friends. Over time, Corina and her husband realised that a big issue for self-employed people was that they never knew how much tax they owed until the year was already over and their box of receipts landed on an accountant’s desk. By the time they started asking how to reduce their tax liability, it was too late to do anything about it.

It would be a problem that they discussed often over the years and eventually they decided it was time to build a tool that could automate the work Corina was doing as well as help simplify how sole traders think about tax and compliance, because tax compliance isn’t just the return but everything you do leading up to it. In February 2024, the founders started building the tool that became Digitax.

From an invoicing tool to a full compliance platform

Corina Popov

The Digitax app has evolved considerably since it was first conceived. The original concept was built around expense management and invoice creation; the wider set of features only emerged later and was shaped by working directly with clients.

Corina knew from the outset what the product needed to do. “I knew exactly what features and functions the product needed to have. I sat and wrote it all down, and then we started looking for somebody technical to build it,” she says. After a period of searching, they decided against bringing in a stranger and instead approached friends who agreed to build it, consulting on the technical decisions along the way. That original technical team has now stepped back and been replaced by a different team.

Working with people she knew and trusted mattered to Corina early on, but there was a trade-off. Her technical collaborators understood software development, but they didn’t understand tax, and translating tax logic into product requirements is genuinely difficult. “I had to explain the formulas and exactly how the features needed to work in detail. If I could go back, I might look for someone who had already built a fintech product before. We could have built twice as fast.”

Digitax supports compliance for sole traders

Digitax is a mobile app built for sole traders. It scans and reads receipts, mapping expenses directly to Form 11 categories, and it generates valid invoices. Users get an accurate running picture of their tax liability throughout the year, rather than discovering it much later when they come to file. The app also automates VAT returns and lets users track their fixed and investment assets.

Because the system is mapped to a user’s specific industry, it can flag when someone is trying to offset spending that isn’t tax-deductible, catching mistakes before they happen. Checks are currently carried out by humans; as the client base grows, machine learning and AI will take on more of that filtering role. Every return that goes through the app is reviewed by a qualified tax professional before anything is submitted to Revenue, so there’s no unchecked automation between the user and the filing.

That distinction is becoming more relevant. Revenue carried out over 291,600 audits and compliance interventions in 2025, yielding €734 million in additional taxes. New withholding-tax obligations for the self-employed are also on the way, making spotless record-keeping an essential element of doing business.

Tackling adoption one task at a time

When Corina began promoting Digitax, she already had a client base in the sole traders she’d been filing returns for. That turned out to be less of an advantage than she expected. When she pitched an AI-powered compliance tool, they weren’t interested. They just wanted her to keep filing their tax forms for them.

The issue wasn’t the product. It was that they didn’t understand the benefits. “Adoption of new tools in legal and finance is notoriously slow. People resist new things. Not because they don’t want them, but because they don’t know the value and the time it might save them.”

The shift came when she stopped selling the app as an end-of-year tool and started showing clients how it could help day to day, walking them through small, low-stakes steps rather than asking for a wholesale adoption. It worked. “All the clients that said they didn’t want the tool are using it now. We’re in the second tax cycle since the app launched and no one has had any questions or issues.”

Digitax’s current user base is mainly composed of millennials, but Corina is betting on Gen Z becoming Digitax’s core market within a couple of years, as she expects younger generations to prefer an app for this type of work over a person. Until then, the plan is to keep educating the market.

Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers programme and PSSF funding

Digitax launched its MVP in February 2025, and Corina joined Phase 2 of New Frontiers in September 2025. Going into the programme at TU Dublin – Blanchardstown Campus, she had no real frame of reference. She’d always been an employee, never a founder, and had no knowledge of the startup ecosystem. “I had no real expectations of the programme because I didn’t fully understand what a founder programme was supposed to do for a company like ours. But it changed my whole approach.”

Working with mentors on the programme reshaped a lot of her thinking, particularly around perfectionism. She had to learn to let go of the feeling that a feature wasn’t ready yet and instead put it in front of the market and see what people thought of it. It’s where the product’s ‘three clicks’ philosophy for every task came from. After successfully completing Phase 2, Corina was awarded a place on Phase 3. In the meantime, the company had also successfully raised PSSF funding.

Enterprise Ireland approved the application for €100,000 in Pre-Seed Start Funding in December 2025. The application-to-payment process took around six months and, while stressful, wasn’t overly complicated, with mentor support throughout. The first tranche of €50,000 went towards salaries for two developers (the company currently has four full-time staff, split between development and operations). The second tranche is earmarked for a CTO who can take ownership of product development, since Corina is still writing every specification herself.

One universal tax tool across the EU

Digitax currently has around 1,000 active users and generates over €25,000 in monthly revenue. It has been translated into Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian to make it even more accessible for those diasporas in Ireland.

The plan is to expand into the UK at the end of 2026 and then into mainland Europe, ideally scaling across several markets at once. The system already runs on an algorithm that adapts to a user’s country of residence, applying local regulation and tax law automatically. Corina’s ambition is for Digitax to be the go-to universal tax tool for the region, in step with the EU’s push towards a unified single market.

Asked what advice she’d give to other founders, Corina doesn’t hesitate: “Do it earlier. My husband and I did talk about this problem for a long time, maybe 10 years, but we weren’t quite sure what the solution was. Maybe I wasn’t ready back then. So if you want to start, just start. Don’t wait!”

Corina was a participant of New Frontiers in Blanchardstown where our Programme Manager is Sarah Dunleavy. Learn more about the company at digitax.ie.