Sphere - Global sales tax / VAT / GST compliance powered by LLMs 🌎

TLDR

Sphere puts global indirect tax compliance (i.e., sales tax, VAT, and GST) on autopilot - everything from nexus monitoring, registration, calculation / collection, filing, and remittance. Our AI-powered tax engine helps tech companies like Runway AI, Sierra AI and Codieum remain in compliance when selling to customers around the world. Want an estimate on your global indirect tax liability free of charge? Talk to the Sphere team today.

The problem

When I ran my last business, we sold our product globally from day 1 and had a number of challenges with domestic and international tax compliance.

Specifically, we didn’t even know where/when we needed to pay sales tax, VAT, or GST, and even when we did, dealing with archaic government portals and filing on a regular basis was a royal pain in the behind.

After talking to hundreds of finance leaders, we found similar pain points, and when it comes to indirect tax, companies either:

• Ignore it, but their tax liabilities accrue, and eventually, they have to pay the liability out of pocket, which can block future fundraises. Additionally, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore as tax authorities pass new regulations to clamp down on indirect tax evasion, especially for tech companies.
• Use an incumbent tax automation tool (e.g. Avalara), but they don’t provide functionality for international coverage, are old/clunky, very expensive, and offer terrible support
• Use local tax advisors, which becomes incredibly expensive as you scale

Our solution

Sphere’s platform puts international indirect tax compliance (i.e., sales tax, VAT, and GST) on autopilot:

Step 1: We integrate with your payment, billing, and HR solutions to help you see where in the world you’ve triggered economic or physical nexus and how big your indirect tax liability is.

Step 2: Once you know where you’re exposed you can register in any jurisdiction via our integrations with local tax authorities. We’ve done the heavy lifting of building these integrations to provide a holistic and superior customer experience (unlike other solutions that will push you to one of their international advisory partners)

Step 3: We leverage scraping technology and LLMs to collect, monitor, and process tax code data around the world (which is then verified by tax experts). Our AI tax engine integrates with your payment and billing provider to ensure you’re calculating and collecting tax correctly for your transactions based on 1. the product being sold and 2. the customer's location.

Step 4: We then file your tax returns in each jurisdiction and remit tax collected to local authorities - on time, every time.

How we are different

• True global coverage: We’ve built out integrations with tax authorities around the world and are building a proprietary system that uses AI to collect and monitor tax data globally, providing compliance across sales tax, VAT, and GST. Other vendors will say they are ‘global’ but will offload you to an international partner for VAT / GST (which means a disjointed experience, more work for you, and more $$$ spent)
• We're focused on fast-growing software / AI companies: We are an extremely developer-friendly product (easy implementation, broad set of integrations, flexible APIs) and have the most transparent and reasonable pricing on the market ($100 / region/month all-inclusive)
• Built with AI at the core: Our tax engine is powered by an LLM trained on local + global tax legislation and tax rate data to ensure all your transactions are in compliance wherever you sell (other vendors do this research manually, which is hard to scale globally and prone to errors!).

Team

Nick comes from a finance background in the TMT sector (PwC, Macquarie) and experienced the pain of dealing with indirect tax firsthand in his last business, which was a B2C marketplace selling across the world.

Mehmood and Miguel built and optimized many of the cross-border compliance systems at Deel and were previously the founding engineers at Capbase (founded by YC alums), which helped businesses with entity setup and administrative compliance around the world.

We’re also lucky to have a team of indirect tax experts from companies like Uber, Avalara, and more.

Vision

We are building an AI-powered cross-border compliance platform so that businesses can transact seamlessly around the world.

As our engine ingests more compliance legislation from each region and becomes more robust with each customer, we will layer in additional cross-border services, including withholding tax, e-invoicing, and payments services, to further help businesses go global from day 1.

We want to be the Deel for international billing.

By abstracting away compliance and cross-border payment admin, we believe this:

• Levels the playing field for startups to compete against global incumbents
• Helps governments and local economies benefit more from international trade

Asks

• Want to better understand your tax liability? Onboard with Sphere for free, and we’ll show you where you’re exposed and provide an estimate of your tax liability (we only charge once you register and file for a jurisdiction)
• Know a CEO or finance leader who needs help with sales tax / VAT / GST or hates their current solution? Please reach out to me at nicholas@getsphere.com or feel free to send the below blurb to them.

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A YC company called Sphere has built an AI-powered indirect tax compliance platform that offers global coverage, easy implementation, and stellar support, all for a flat fee per region per month. They’re already helping global software and AI businesses like Runway AI, Sierra AI, Codeium, and many more. Book a time with them here.