Machine Learning Engineer 4

Avalara ushers in new era of agentic tax and compliance with Avalara Aviator. 24 Sep, 2026, 09:00 IST Avalara's new agent hub brings together specialized AI agents to execute complex tax and compliance workflows while keeping people in control of the decisions that matter PUNE, India, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, today unveiled Avalara Aviator at its CRUSH customer and partner conference. The new agent hub for tax and compliance turns days of manual work into minutes of oversight, with an audit-defensible record for every action. As businesses expand across markets, channels, and business models, tax and compliance requirements are becoming more interconnected, more digital, and increasingly real-time. For years, tax software has automated individual compliance tasks, but much of the work between those tasks has remained manual and siloed. Avalara Aviator is designed to close that gap with intelligent agents that can understand context, coordinate work, monitor variance, and take action. Humans delegate the work while remaining in control of the decisions. "Our customers need a system they can trust to get real work done," said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara. "Avalara Aviator fulfills that need. It's built on more than 22 years of closed-loop compliance data, which informs every calculation, every filing, and every report. And that's what enables us to turn days of manual compliance work into minutes of confident oversight." A turning point for compliance For years, tax software has automated discrete compliance tasks, such as calculating taxes, filing returns, and managing exemption certificates. While that sped up each task, finance professionals have been left bridging the gaps between them, such as having to manage configurations, interpret reports, chase approvals, and understand how to construct business logic to meet their requirements. Avalara is the first company to bridge these industry-wide deficits by bringing specialized AI agents, tax and compliance workflows, and Avalara's trusted compliance technology into a connected agent hub. This helps customers move from understanding what needs to happen to getting the work done. Customers interact with Avalara Aviator in plain language through Avi, its orchestrator AI agent. Avi can orchestrate by reaching out to "lead agents" that oversee key areas like research, certificates, and returns. The agents validate, reconcile, proactively surface insights, and execute compliance work, while keeping people in control of decisions requiring judgment and oversight. The initial Avalara Aviator experience supports compliance operations, including capabilities that help customers: * Map products to tax codes * Report transaction and tax liability data * Validate exemption certificates * Auto-generate tax matrices * Analyze results across multiple applications * Configure custom rules For example, a customer can describe a needed tax rule in plain language. Avi then drafts the rule, simulates its impact on past transactions, and flags any conflicts with other rules. The customer reviews and approves the change before Avi activates the rule. Avalara Aviator is initially being delivered to existing customers at no additional cost. Over time, Avalara plans to extend agentic capabilities across more of the compliance lifecycle and into the ERP, e-commerce, finance, and collaboration platforms customers already use. The goal is to make Avalara's trusted tax and compliance platform available wherever work is happening. Built for trust, accuracy, and control Generic AI tools can struggle with complex, multi-step workflows that require context, accuracy, and continuity over time. They can't connect to critical business systems fast enough to be useful, and they aren't purpose-built for the accuracy that business-critical workflows demand. In contrast, Avalara Aviator combines agentic AI with the compliance infrastructure Avalara has built for more than 22 years. That includes proprietary data and learnings from the market's most trusted tax and compliance platform. The result is an agentic experience designed to go beyond plausible answers and deliver source-backed, explainable, and expert-verified outcomes customers can understand, trust, and defend. Preya Chandan, Senior Tax Accountant with Singer Equipment Company, Inc., a distributor of foodservice equipment and an Avalara Aviator beta customer, said the technology has changed how she approaches her work. "As a tax accountant focused on audit readiness, I need tools that go beyond answering questions to help me think about the ones I haven't asked yet," Chandan said. "Avalara Aviator does that in one place, explaining taxability in plain language, surfacing considerations I might have missed, and providing trusted research I can rely on for detailed, defensible work." Industry analysts say that a combination of usefulness and defensibility is particularly important as AI moves deeper into regulated business processes. "Agentic AI adoption in finance has moved well beyond exploration, and the question is now about how to broadly scale its use," said Kevin Permenter, Research Director at IDC. "Finance teams are prioritizing agentic AI because they see it as an important operational capability. Scaling that impact depends on security and compliance, data quality and governance, and reliable outputs. That's why many finance organizations lean toward agent capabilities that sit directly alongside their core SaaS systems, where existing security controls and financial data models are already established." The next era of agentic tax and compliance Avalara Aviator advances Avalara's broader vision for agentic tax and compliance: intelligent systems that find and manage risk before it finds you. It's designed to not only monitor but proactively recommend actions. Upcoming enhancements will include features such as self-healing, in which agents examine changes to your business and recommend fixes to root discrepancies before they can turn into filing liabilities. It will be able to catch anomalies unloading a traditional human review onto an agentic worker. Avalara Aviator will be generally available following next month's Avalara CRUSH Europe event. About Avalara Avalara is the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance. For more than two decades, Avalara's trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, and technology have helped customers succeed on a global scale. Avalara now pairs that foundation with agentic AI to help businesses execute complex compliance work while keeping people in control. Avalara processes more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls annually and supports millions of businesses worldwide. For more information, visit Avalara.com. This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding Avalara's product plans, technology capabilities, and expected availability dates. These statements describe Avalara's intentions as of the date of release and are subject to change without notice.

Numeral raises $100M to turn AI into a full-time sales tax accountant. September 24, 2026 * Numeral raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Insight Partners. * The AI platform now handles sales tax, VAT and GST for more than 3,500 businesses. * California's new SaaS tax law is exactly the kind of shift Numeral is betting on. Ask a finance team what keeps them up at night, and sales tax rarely makes the list, until a business crosses into a new state or country and discovers it owes tax it didn't know existed. Numeral, a San Francisco startup that automates that exact headache with artificial intelligence, has raised $100 million in Series C funding, bringing its total raised to $157 million. Insight Partners led the round, joined by Salesforce Ventures, Geodesic, Benchmark, Mayfield, FCVC, Y Combinator and Uncork Capital. "Sales tax has become a much bigger operational challenge as companies grow across markets, systems and business models. Businesses need infrastructure that can keep pace as rules and requirements change across jurisdictions, without adding more manual work for their teams," said Sam Ross, co-founder and chief executive of Numeral. The timing is not a coincidence. California recently signed Senate Bill 122 into law, extending sales and use tax to prewritten software, including SaaS, from January 1, 2027, a change expected to raise close to $2 billion a year for the state. It is exactly the sort of rule change that leaves finance teams scrambling to update billing systems and filings across dozens of jurisdictions at once. How Numeral works. Ross, a former Airbnb product manager, founded Numeral in 2023 with chief technology officer Matt DuVall, an engineer who previously worked on Stripe and Notion, after running his own e-commerce brands and discovering how fast tax obligations multiply once a company sells in more than one state. The startup combines a deterministic tax engine with AI and human tax specialists, covering the full lifecycle from nexus monitoring and registrations to calculation, filing, remittance and exemption certificate management. It supports VAT and GST compliance in more than 90 countries and integrates with more than 40 billing, financial, and ERP systems. Numeral says that when businesses migrate their existing exemption certificates onto the platform, 30% to 40% fail validation on the first pass, a sign of how much manual error the industry has been quietly carrying. Competition heats up. Numeral competes with incumbents such as Avalara and Vertex, and with newer AI-native rivals including Anrok and Zamp, all of which sell similar automation to e-commerce and SaaS companies. Two adjacent bets are also emerging in the same neighbourhood. Tech Funding News previously covered Munich's Skalar, which raised €12 million to build an AI-first tax and accounting firm from scratch rather than sell software to existing advisers. Berlin's Integral took a similar path, raising €18 million to pair AI agents with licensed professionals for small and medium-sized businesses. London-based Yonda Tax is chasing a narrower slice of the same problem, closing a $15 million round in December 2025 focused specifically on cross-border VAT, GST and sales tax automation. While those companies are experimenting with owning the professional service itself, Numeral is betting that staying software, backed by deep tax expertise, is the model that scales faster. The global tax management market is projected to grow from $24.52 billion in 2025 to $33.21 billion by 2030, a 6.3% compound annual growth rate, according to MarketsandMarkets. Numeral says its total transaction volume grew 327% year over year, and it expects its tax engine to process more than 80 million transactions. Customers can cut time spent on filings and registrations by up to 80%, the company says, and its exemption certificate product can save up to 400 hours a year. Insight Partners has previously backed Shopify, Twitter and DocuSign, giving Numeral a well-resourced partner as it chases larger enterprise customers. "Sales tax is mission-critical to get right, and the complexity is only growing as regulations expand into new products and markets," said Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners. Arvind Ayyala, partner at Geodesic Capital, added: "Tax compliance has traditionally forced businesses to choose between expensive manual work and software that still leaves them carrying the operational burden. Numeral is changing that model by combining deep tax expertise with AI-native infrastructure to deliver tax compliance as an outcome." Numeral plans to use the new capital to expand into software, manufacturing, distribution and wholesale, and to grow its engineering, sales, marketing and product teams. It is also expanding its accounting partner programme, allowing firms to refer clients, resell Numeral, or advise customers during implementation. Sales tax compliance is one of the least glamorous problems in fintech, which may be exactly why it has pulled in so much capital this year. As more states and countries redraw what counts as taxable, the real test for Numeral and its rivals will not be how many new industries they add, but whether AI-run tax engines can keep pace with regulators who are just as capable of rewriting the rules as software is of automating them.

Avalara has appointed Claire Goad as General Manager of E-Invoicing and Live Reporting. Goad will oversee the company's global e-invoicing business, including go-to-market execution, partner delivery, and international expansion as governments worldwide introduce continuous transaction controls and digital reporting mandates. Goad brings over 20 years of experience in invoice automation, supplier enablement, and indirect tax workflows. She previously served as Senior Vice President of Invoice Automation Sales and Delivery at Tungsten Automation, where she led global sales and delivery teams. The appointment comes as multinational businesses navigate expanding e-invoicing regulations across Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific, including mandates in France, Germany, and the EU's ViDA initiative. Avalara was recently positioned in the Leaders category in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide E-Invoicing Compliance Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment.