Thomson Reuters acquires American tax automation software SafeSend for $600 million USD

Toronto-based business information services giant Thomson Reuters has acquired tax software provider cPaperless, which operates as SafeSend, for $600 million USD ($864.5 million CAD) in cash.

Founded in 2008 and based in Ann Arbor, Mich., SafeSend aims to eliminate some of the manual work of tax professionals by automating the “last-mile” of the tax return, including assembly, review, taxpayer e-signature, and delivery. 

Thomson Reuters expects SafeSend to generate approximately $60 million of revenue in 2025. 

SafeSend integrates with various tax preparation tools used by accounting professionals, such as CCH Axcess, Intuit Lacerte, and Thomson Reuters’s own UltraTax CS.

SafeSend claims its solutions are used by 70 percent of the United States’ top 500 accounting firms. 

Thomson Reuters provides a variety of business information services such as specialized software and tools for legal, tax, accounting, and compliance professionals, in addition to operating a global news service, Reuters.

Thomson Reuters said that it expects SafeSend to generate approximately $60 million of revenue in 2025, and that it will grow more than 25 percent annually in the next few years. 

RELATED: Thomson Reuters acquires American portfolio company Materia AI

Thomson Reuters added it intends to continue to offer SafeSend as a market solution, supporting the ability to interoperate with multiple vendors across a connected tax software ecosystem. 

“By integrating SafeSend’s innovative technology with our existing solutions, we’re simplifying tax preparation workflows, and meeting the dynamic demands of businesses we serve to help them thrive in an increasingly complex tax landscape,” Thomson Reuters’s president of tax, audit and accounting professionals, Elizabeth Beastrom, said in a statement. 

BetaKit has reached out to Thomson Reuters for more information on how SafeSend and its 235 employees will be integrated post-acquisition, but did not receive an answer by publication time. 

The acquisition joins Thomson Reuters’s tax software portfolio, which has been bolstered by a couple of large acquisitions in recent years. 

In early 2023, Thomson Reuters closed its $500-million USD acquisition of SurePrep, a California-based tax automation software and services company. This past October, Thomson Reuters acquired New York-based Materia AI, another tax accounting workflow automation platform, for an undisclosed amount. Materia had only emerged from stealth four months earlier, after securing $6.3 million USD from a group of investors that included Thomson Reuters Ventures, according to TechCrunch. 

Feature image courtesy Scott Graham via Unsplash.