Making the decision to work for yourself as a freelancer or solo entrepreneur should be an empowering and positive step. Yet, for many freelancers, there are often bureaucratic roadblocks that cost them precious time and money. In Spain, most freelancers have little money to pay an accountant, but they lose up to 4,000 euro a year from filing incorrect accounts. After working with freelancers for 20 years as a lawyer, Marta Zaragozá saw how accountancy and tax consultancy can be a needlessly complicated and expensive service. So in 2015, Marta collaborated with Juanjo Traver and Vicente Solsona to create Declarando – a service that uses machine learning to provide access to affordable tax advice online and on demand. Declarando uses a client’s business data (such as sales, expenses and yearly tax return) and analyzes it to make a series of personal suggestions, just as a tax adviser would, for a fraction of the cost to the user. “We understood that there was a massive opportunity to disrupt the sector using technology,” said Vicente. “We realized that we needed to build software that can bring the best tax service to everyone.”

The team began their idea from their home city of Castellón de la Plana, Spain. The city is better known for its beaches than its tech startups, but the team was inspired by the nascent tech scene of neighbouring city Valencia, and driven to help empower the freelance community that Marta had worked with for so long. After establishing their business, the team wanted to lay the groundwork to make their idea scalable, creating a larger customer base and expanding into new territories. They turned to the Residency program at Google for Startups Campus Madrid to get the support they needed. “We come from a very little town and moving to Madrid to be part of Residency was like being selected for the Major Leagues,” said Vicente. “We got the opportunity to learn from companies that had already made it, grow with startups in our same stage and who had similar problems, and make the most of all the possibilities that Google for Startups had to offer.”