When Jimmy Carter served as the governor of Georgia, he made the state a bustling hub for the film industry and the ancillary tourism, hospitality and retail businesses that came with it.
How? Through transferable tax credits.
Decades later, an El Segundo-based tax credits and incentive platform called Incentify raised $9.5 million in series A to take advantage of those tax credits, the company announced Wednesday. The round was led by Innovent Capital Group.
Incentify’s enterprise-grade software-as-a-service platform is meant to help companies find and utilize tax credits in order to save money. Incentify has amassed a roster of over 1,000 businesses across a variety of sectors, including Amazon.com Inc., The Kroger Co., Sony Corp., Moderna Inc. and KPMG.
Incentify also works with small businesses, including a coffee shop across the street from its office which Incentify found over $200,000 in incentives for. The company did not provided more detailed information about the particular incentives found.
“Especially now that the economy is a little bit more turbulent than it’s been over the last few years, everyone’s looking for money underneath their couch cushions,” Incentify Chief Executive Laurence Sotsky said.
Untangling the tax incentive web
Credit and incentive management platforms are getting a lot of investor love, Startups in the category broke an all-time record in terms of deal count in 2024, according to data from PitchBook. Wrapbook, a Burbank-based accounting startup, announced it raised $20 million in equity financing in September to manage payroll and tax credits.
Like many tech companies in La La Land, Incentify began in 2019 and was geared toward the film industry, allowing independent filmmakers to quickly wring every last cent in transferable tax credits out of their project so they could finance their next movie. If said movie was produced in Georgia, the state-based Coca-Cola was notorious for buying up leftover credits.
Eventually, Incentify worked its way up the Hollywood food chain to Paramount Global (then Viacom CBS) which, in fact, already knew it could toss leftover credits to Coca-Cola. What it didn’t have was a standardized way to find and manage new credits – like through hiring in communities that are economically depressed or executing on a sustainable energy project.
“The government makes it very difficult for you to actually get that money unless you have a system like ours,” Sotsky said.
Growing the company
A year and a half ago, Incentify hired more than 20 people to collect a slew of federal, state and municipality tax credit data in North America, including Census designated zones and government-appointed disaster zones or economically depressed areas that could provide even more tax credits. It created a large language model and artificial intelligence-enabled assistant to guide users through finding tax credits. By putting in the address of a distribution center or headquarters, Incentify shows which zones intersect and what credits the business qualifies for.
“We’re able to democratize credits and incentives for everyone,” Sotsky said. “…not just to the few, but to the many.”
The company plans to use the fresh funding to double its workforce from 30 to 60 – largely hires in data science and product. It also wants to expand its well of data outside of North America and work with partners to identify labor credits – which would be extremely useful for companies in the manufacturing sector.
