Founded by Shiloh Luckey, ComplYant was a tax assistance service that allowed users to manage taxes for a single or multiple businesses from one dashboard. It helped keep track of tax deadlines, business license renewal dates, and had the ability to sync with other business management applications like Quickbooks, Stripe, Shopify, Square, and Clover.
In 2021, ComplYant got accepted into Techstars’ Los Angeles program. Over the next 3 years, the startup raised funding from multiple VCs including David Sacks-founded Craft Ventures, Mucker Capital, Techstars, Slauson & Co., Act One Ventures, Moving Capital, Josh Mohrer, Fika Ventures, and others. The company was also recognized by Built In as one of the Best Places to Work in 2023.
On November 21, 2025, SEC announced that it filed charges against Shiloh Luckey for allegedly fraudulently raising more than $13 million between 2020 and 2023. According to the statement, Luckey made false claims to investors about the success of ComplYant’s business telling investors that ComplYant’s monthly revenues had grown from around $2,500 in November 2020 to over $250,000 by September 2022, while only generated on average monthly revenues of about $250 during that period and averaged fewer than four new subscribers each month.
In addition, on top of her salary from ComplYant, Luckey alleged misused $2.2 million of the investor funds raised. She used ComplYant’s funds for personal expenses including travel to Aspen, Miami Beach, Turks and Caicos, and Lisbon; Super Bowl tickets; a wedding in the Caribbean; and the purchase of a personal car and her $1.5M residence.
In Sep 2026, Luckey was charged with nine counts of securities fraud, three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and two counts of money laundering. She was arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, before she attempted to board a cruise ship for a vacation.
Here’s the pitch deck Luckey used to raise funding from investors:
Nearly half of the money mentioned in the SEC release was raised using the very slides you see below, which Luckey used to close a $5.5M seed round led by Craft Ventures in February 2022 (a VC firm founded by David Sacks, who was later appointed “White House AI and Crypto Czar” in 2024).
One of the main selling points of the ComplYant’s pitch deck was Luckey’s experience. She told investors that she had spent 14 years in tax accounting saving large corporations millions of dollars as an audit manager until she realized she can do this at the grand level.
According to the SEC filing, Luckey represented herself as a CPA, but there is no record of her ever having the accreditation.
Luckey also claimed that she bootstrapped ComplYant while running a tax practice during the daytime. She tried learning coding online so she could create the software but eventually invested around $50,000 of her own money to pay developers.
Taxpayers in the U.S. pay over $60 billion annually in tax penalties; from late payments and underpayments to local licensing and sales tax fines. ComplYant goal was to save its user from these penalties by building a comprehensive platform that would remind the users when they needed to file the tax forms. It also had a tax savings automation tool licensed from Stripe that sets aside money from users’ bank accounts into a savings account dedicated to future tax bills.
The idea came directly from founder Luckey’s day-to-day experience helping people who felt completely lost when dealing with taxes. “I was looking for websites where I could just send them to learn like a quick snapshot of all of the taxes they were supposed to pay. Couldn’t find anything like that,” she said in an interview.
At the time of this fundraise, Lucky claimed that the company had saved its customers over 70,000 hours and $4 million in late fees.
ComplYant’s claimed pre-revenue traction was noticeable. It was accepted into various accelerators including Grid110, MuckerLab, and Techstars. The startup also received pre-seed funding from VCs like Slauson & Co., Mucker Capital, and Tale Venture Partners in 2021. Before landing the $5.5M seed round using this pitch deck, Luckey raised a total of $1.5 million between VC and money from accelerator programs, landing herself on Business Insider’s list of 48 Black women who received $1 million or more in VC money.
Unfortunately, most of this traction was fabricated: the deck claimed that ComplYant has 1200 subscriber, but according to the SEC filing, the company never had more than 131 total paying subscribers. In later investor pitches, Luckey claimed ComplYant was earning hundreds of thousands in monthly revenue, when the startup actually never cross $620 in monthly revenue according to the SEC.
Luckey promised to use the funds to hire more employees, develop the software platform, support customers and pay employee benefits. In 2023, ComplYant was employing 50 people when funds dried out and operations ceased abruptly. Luckey severed contact with staff, leaving employees without paychecks for seven weeks. Employees also found missing 401k contributions.
Prosecutors say Luckey faces up to 20 years in prison for each securities-fraud and wire-fraud count, up to 30 years on the bank-fraud count, and up to 10 years for each money-laundering count if convicted.
See the full ComplYant Pitch Deck (and thousands more) at https://bestpitchdeck.com/complyant