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The problem to solve: In the US alone, accountants and auditors are leaving the field, a purported 17% decline in registered CPAs. The rest of the world is mirroring this phenomenon. Older professionals are retiring faster than new ones enter. The experience gap is only widening, while fewer students are choosing accounting degrees. Some see it as a “talent branding crisis”—it’s either not sexy enough or seen as a profession where one can’t “make it big,” or both. The workload can be seen as too overwhelming, and the upsides too few.
Christopher López founded Valarix to give CPAs the tools they need to move more quickly and confidently, and venture capital has already taken notice.
Confronting a Global CPA Crisis
López, CEO and founder of Valarix, is a CPA, tax accountant, scientist, and researcher who still teaches a tax law master’s class every Saturday. Whether you can believe it or not, he exudes passion for accounting. It’s clear that he loves it, and his desire to democratize tax optimization is what Valarix is all about.
“When I ran my own tax firm, you would see the same thing with small businesses so often,” López says. “It wasn’t that the businesses were trying to get away with not paying their taxes. They didn’t have the proficiency to do so. It was too complicated and too expensive. You need a lot of reviews and a lot of advice to help a small business optimize its tax operations.”
López wants to make one thing abundantly clear: Valarix isn’t made to replace CPAs. Lay people aren’t going to get along with the software. The founder calls it “the most technical tax software there is.” Valarix isn’t trying to create digital CPAs; it’s trying to help those who understand their business to do it faster and more efficiently.
The founder compares it to developer tools like Cursor, software that lets anyone touch code, but still demands real understanding of APIs, databases, and JavaScript to build something meaningful. That is already a strong differentiator for an AI environment where the goal often seems to be “easy for everyone” and more often translates into “nothing for anybody.”
López isn’t trying to serve everyone. He wants to serve a subset exquisitely.
True Believers
Who believes in Valarix? López took his idea to Techstars Miami with only a few thousand dollars in his bank account in early 2024 and left with over $200,000 in funding. Shark Tank Mexico also saw fit to get involved, despite what López joked was the most nervous he’d ever been in his life. His team has grown from two to eight, and he’s already politely turned down some exit opportunities.
Later this summer, Valarix plans to launch an AI tax lab in partnership with universities in Mexico, focused on fine‑tuning Google’s open‑source Gemma 2 model for tax compliance across Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. The lab will build a highly vertical, tax‑specific model under a permissive Apache 2.0–style license, making the resulting model open source and available for reuse and resale.
“We’re going to be the first AI vertical lab for taxes in North America,” López says. The goal is not just a competitive edge. Again, it’s democratization.
If governments and tax agencies eventually endorse or integrate the open model, so much the better. He imagines a future where Mexican authorities and even the IRS support or at least recognize this kind of open, standardized AI tooling for tax optimization and compliance.
Mexican Made
There is so much about López’s founding of Valarix that makes it unique. He moved from Mexico to Miami for his first job and remembers thinking how easy it would be to start a business if he stayed in the US.
“But I thought again,” the founder says. “Wouldn’t it mean more to build this unicorn in Mexico, my home? I mean, I had an offer to eventually become a CFO at my employer, but I turned it down to build this. I truly believe Mexico and the US need to be better integrated. We share so much history. Some of it is not so good, but I believe we have to build a future together. If Mexico does well, the US does well.”
López is transparent about the more technical realities that make starting in Mexico a better idea: a more generalized and unified tax law compared to what can sometimes seem like 50 different approaches to any given piece of tax legislation.
There is more good news. Valarix has fundraising news that will be public soon, and they’re hoping to scale from 10,000 to 30,000 active users by year’s end. López has competitors, and he jokes that almost all of them seem to be larger players in the space, at present. But Valarix is gaining ground.
López is betting that Mexican ingenuity, AI application, and deep expertise can help solve a global accounting crisis.
