the e-⁠resident tax man

E-⁠resident Krunoslav Gašpert founded eVAT to solve the headache of manual tax compliance, and discovered 'the best bureaucracy' in Estonia in the process

Krunoslav Gašpert got into the tax compliance business the same way that any professional gets into anything, with the right combination of natural aptitude, curiosity, serendipity, and perfect timing.

Born and raised in Croatia, Krunoslav, or Kruno as his friends call him, always had a knack for business and in 2005 he received a bachelor's degree in entrepreneurship economics from VERN University of Applied Sciences in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. He then embarked on a career in sales and marketing, taking on managerial roles at a dairy company, in bakery manufacturing, and within a banking group, before his country's entry into the EU in 2013 marked the beginning of a significant career shift for him.

That year he began working as CEO for a Croatian branch of a global consulting and corporate services company, specializing in international value added tax (VAT) compliance. A newcomer to the industry, he nevertheless had to learn the ins and outs of international VAT at a time when Croatia was aligning its regulations to that of the EU. "EU VAT compliance was new and nobody knew anything about it," recalls Kruno. "So I had the same starting point as everyone else. It was tabula rasa."

Kruno found he enjoyed the work, as everything made sense and was logical. "Somehow I started liking it, even though it's so complex for most people," he says. "I feel like I'm an expert and I like doing it," he says. "Before I started, I would have never thought that I would do this," he adds. But he has built a career since, not only as a consultant, but as a digital entrepreneur.

A move to Berlin, and an e-move to Estonia

By the mid-2010s, Kruno was flying high. As a CEO of a tax consulting company, he had a steady job and the money was coming in. Like anyone at the top, he longed for more.

"I wasn't happy in Croatia," he says. "I always felt there was more out there, because Croatia is such a small market and I wanted to have my own business."

Around this time he was traveling regularly to Berlin to immerse himself in the electronic music scene, and a chance encounter led him to relocate to the city where he was engaged in building a vintage clothing store. While it didn't last, it offered him an opportunity to do something new and Berlin felt right at the time."The international community is huge and I appreciate how  multicultural it is," Kruno says.

Itching to go Europe-wide with his tax consulting business, Kruno wanted to set up a new company. German bureaucracy, however, stood in the way, as did its love of old technologies. For a tech-savvy young entrepreneur, Germany's reliance on fax machines was a bit of a deal breaker. German law recognizes fax communication as legally binding, on the other hand communication over email is not legally binding.

Kruno did what any entrepreneur would do and turned to the internet for a solution. "I wanted to create a company that would give me the freedom to live wherever I wanted to," he recalls. "I wasn't sure if I wanted to stay in Germany." That's how he discovered Estonian e-⁠Residency.

'The best bureaucracy'

He applied through the Estonian embassy in Berlin and after careful vetting by Estonian authorities, Krunoslav Gašpert became the latest addition to the e-Residency family. "It was quite straightforward," Kruno says of the experience:

Kruno calls Estonian bureaucracy "the best bureaucracy" because of its simple, digital nature. He also visited Estonia at this time to set up a bank account in person, happening to make his first sojourn to his newfound digital homeland during a late winter snowstorm that coated Tallinn.

Of this first, wintry visit to Estonia, he enthuses:

He quickly went about setting up his first Estonian company, called Pullus Consulting, in 2018, offering VAT registration, compliance, refund, and consulting services to small and medium-sized enterprises. Pullus also offers management and business consulting, strategic advising, and investment management. The business was a success. At some point, Kruno was managing more than 2,000 clients. While his customer base kept growing, he was wearing thin.

"Everything was manual," he says. "I had no life, I was constantly working. It was just too much."

Kruno decided to seek out a software platform that could help him automate his processes, but couldn't find anything that really worked. Necessity being the mother of invention, he did what any handy Estonian, digital or otherwise, would do. He decided to make his own software tool.

Kruno and colleagues developed the platform, which they later dubbed eVAT, at a steady pace. They soon found that it saved around 84 percent of their time with its automated processes.

"We decided to develop a platform for the market and that's when we pivoted to eVAT," he says.

He set up a second Estonian company with that name to commercialize the software in 2022. In January 2025, eVAT joined the e-⁠Residency Marketplace and now provides VAT support for other e-⁠resident founders from around the world.

Cutting through the tax jungle

According to Kruno, eVAT is a platform that can organize a company's digital activities, pulling data from Shopify, Amazon, and other selling platforms in real time, applying EU and UK taxes to every invoice, storing receipts and filings and other records, and making changes as needed. The company bills the platform as a compliance co-pilot that helps users clear border-crossing paperwork, prepare for audits, and to assist them in navigating evolving regulatory complexities.

According to Kruno, while EU and UK tax compliance is the current focus of eVAT, it has been built so it can scale globally. "We created it with the plan to become the number one global compliance management platform in the future."

The platform can also make adjustments as needed. In Estonia, for example, VAT will rise to 24 percent in July, and eVAT is already prepared to begin adjusting the rate for all transactions from that date. "We can update that with literally one click," says Kruno. "Our customers don't even notice that anything has changed."

That desire to focus on eVAT might even lead him to set up an office in Estonia for the business. Kruno explains his decision:

Looking forward, Kruno says he will continue to operate Pullus while improving eVAT for a wider scale commercial launch. "It's still in the late beta stage," Kruno says. "I don't want to put something out there that isn't bulletproof, because we are dealing with taxes," he underscores.