TripTax

Success Story

Building fast, secure and paperless tourist tax refund

Slash has been my most trusted partner, fiercest critic and strongest enabler. The Slash team has given me the superpowers and backing I need to bootstrap a travel startup, navigate COVID-19 turmoil and deep tech.
Arnaud Rubeck, CEO of TripWorld

TripWorld's founding vision is to deliver savings, speed and simplicity to the travel experience, starting with a better tourist tax refund (VAT/GST) solution called “TripTax”. Tourist-tax refunds (VAT/GST) are time-consuming due to long queues and paperwork, involve expensive FX transactions and are subject to high commission (up to 43% by market leaders!).

2019
Founded
Singapore
HQ
<10
Employees
2019-2020
Project

TripTax empowers merchants (tax agents) and tourists to handle the tax refund digitally and without the need to queue at the airport. To realize this vision, TripWorld sought a technical co-founder to challenge, design and implement  TripTax and support with architecting its startup roadmap.

Project Highlights

 

TripTax’ technology enables a workflow where the initial tax receipt and purchase is securely digitized, an untampered proof of repatriation of the purchase is obtained and the refund can be processed by the government.

 

To achieve this, we use state-of-the-art AI object recognition technology in partnership with university researchers in Europe and store the transactions on a permissioned blockchain, R3 Corda.

 

Slash is taking on a role as the tech lead from beginning to end. As one of the main shareholders, Slash also sits on the board and supports defining the business roadmap (strategy and go-to-market, financial plan,, team).

 

As a result of very long sales cycles to obtain government tax licenses and the unexpected turmoil brought by COVID-19, Slash has also supported TripTax with designing stop-gap monetization solutions. This includes an email add-on that monetises your inbox by adding non-intrusive adverts below each email, without storing customer data, and automatically allows you to plant trees for emails received.

 

The backend is built on NodeJS, mobile app on React Native, and infrastructure on AWS and R3 Corda. The AI algorithms in Python. 

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