July 31, 2026 — Luca IQ, a tax technology company building a professional-grade tax engine for CPA and tax firms, has passed IRS Assurance Testing and is now an authorized IRS e-file provider, approved as a Software Developer, Transmitter, and Intermediate Service Provider. The company can now prepare, calculate, and e-file federal individual returns through its own engine.

Luca IQ is built as a replacement for the professional tax engines most firms rely on today. Those systems were first created decades ago and designed as closed desktop products, built before software was expected to connect to anything else. The newer tools that promise to fix that problem still sit on top of those same engines, using robotic process automation to push and pull data between systems. Luca IQ replaces the engine instead of wrapping it.

Here is how it works.

Document intake. A firm uploads a client’s source documents, including W-2s, 1099s, K-1s, and brokerage statements. Luca IQ reads each document and maps the values to the specific lines of the return they belong on, with every figure traceable back to the document it came from. Nothing is retyped.

Deterministic calculation. The engine computes every return using rules-based logic rather than probabilistic models. The same inputs always produce the same result, and every figure traces back to the rule and the source document that produced it. Those calculations have now passed IRS Assurance Testing.

Direct e-filing. Luca IQ transmits completed returns to the IRS itself. Firms do not route their filings through a separate transmitter sitting on top of an older engine.

API access. The platform is built API first. A single call returns a completed return as structured data, as a formatted PDF, or as a return e-filed with the IRS.

“I spent years working in local tax firms and then as a CPA, watching people retype numbers into software older than they are,” said Angelo Policicchio, co-founder and CEO of Luca IQ. “The problem was never that the incumbents are bad at tax math. It is that nothing connects. Every firm has stitched together a stack of workarounds because the underlying engine has no way to talk to anything else. We rebuilt the engine so that it does, and we have now taken our 1040 calculations through IRS testing end to end.”

Unlike consumer tax products, Luca IQ does not sell to taxpayers. It sells only through CPA and tax firms and does not offer a DIY product for clients to file without accountants.

“We separated the two problems every firm faces,” said Akash Sadashivapeth, co-founder and CTO of Luca IQ. “Automation handles the tedious document work up front. A deterministic engine handles the math, so the calculation is auditable and identical every time.”

Luca IQ is part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 batch. CPA and tax firms are onboarding now ahead of the upcoming filing season.

About Luca IQ

Luca IQ is a tax technology company building a modern, professional-grade tax engine and workflow platform for CPA and tax firms. It was founded by CEO Angelo Policicchio, a licensed CPA and Harvard Business School graduate, and CTO Akash Sadashivapeth, a University of Pennsylvania engineer and a Harvard Business School graduate. The company is an authorized IRS e-file provider, approved as a Software Developer, Transmitter, and Intermediate Service Provider, and has passed IRS Assurance Testing for Form 1040. It is named after Luca Pacioli, the Renaissance friar and mathematician regarded as the father of accounting. Learn more at lucaiq.com.