We started with the messiest tax problem there is.
Then we built the platform that should have existed the whole time - one place to coordinate cross-border tax end to end, documents to filing.
We didn't start with a product. We started with the work.
Between us, we spent five years inside Koinly - Karim on customer support, Yana on the compliance and accountant team. The pattern was the same every day: someone with income in two or three countries trying to figure out who to talk to, in what order, and how to make sure the answer in one country didn't contradict the answer in another.
People weren't short on advisors. They were short on coordination. One expert per country, each working in isolation. The client became the project manager - chasing documents, reconciling spreadsheets, translating treaty rules between three accountants who never spoke to each other.
In 2024 we left to start HandyTax OÜ, a manual consultancy. No product, no platform, no funding. Just us running cross-border engagements by hand - 100+ cases before we wrote a single line of platform code. We needed to prove the wedge with our own hands first.
Every painful step inside that consultancy became a feature on the platform. The assessment that figures out which experts you need. The matching that picks them. The workspace where documents, tasks, quotes, and invoices live in one place. One engagement, one invoice, every jurisdiction.
Today Handy is live in the UK ↔ Australia corridor, adding markets by demand. HandyTax OÜ - the consultancy that started it all - now onboards clients through the platform we built.
How we got here
Consultancy first. Platform second. Marketplace third.
Koinly to consulting
We left Koinly because the hardest problem we saw every day was not crypto - it was multi-jurisdiction coordination. People didn't need another calculator; they needed someone to actually run the engagement.
HandyTax OÜ as proof
We started a manual consultancy, not a product. 100+ cross-border cases handled by hand. Every case ran on email, spreadsheets, and shared drives - exactly the tools the wedge attacks.
Building the workflow
Every painful step in HandyTax became a feature: assessment, matching, document collection, task management, quoting, billing, multi-jurisdiction engagement. The platform is the consultancy, productised.
Corridor soft-launch
Live now in the UK ↔ Australia corridor, adding markets by demand. We're onboarding clients through HandyTax OÜ - the consultancy that started it all, now running on the platform we built.
Two people, one practice, every step.
Karim and Yana built Handy together - the consultancy, the platform, and the cases that informed both.
A year on Koinly customer support - talking to thousands of people whose tax lives broke the moment they crossed a border.
Built HandyTax OÜ and the Handy platform end-to-end: assessment wizard, expert portal, client workspace, payments, RLS, the lot.
Four years in Koinly's compliance and accountant team - 300+ audits, 1,500+ tax enquiries, 98% accuracy across multi-jurisdiction edge cases.
MSc Financial Economics, Sorbonne. Runs the HandyTax client book and defines how cases are scoped, priced, and reviewed on the platform.
Tax is the first thing that breaks when you cross borders. It's not the last.
Handy is building the operating layer for a globally mobile life. Tax is where we start because it's where we have the deepest scar tissue - but the same coordination problem shows up in legal, in immigration, in banking, in everything that assumes you live in one place.
Want the long-form version?
We're hiring experts, onboarding clients, and expanding corridor by corridor. Say hello.