The interesting thing about Michelle Valentine’s tax company is that she can sympathize with the tax collector. Before Anrok, before Airtable, before the venture-capital meetings, she worked on financing public infrastructure. Schools and water utilities need money. Software founders would prefer to spend their afternoons building software. Valentine had acquired a professional understanding of both positions. Eventually, she built a business in the awkward space between them.
Sales tax is an unlikely conversational icebreaker. Mention it at dinner and somebody will remember an urgent appointment elsewhere. Yet the subject kept returning in Valentine’s conversations with startup finance people. They were worried about their obligations and uncertain how to manage them. She paid attention to the repetition. Here was a recurring task that growing companies needed to perform, with consequences for getting it wrong and little enthusiasm for doing it themselves.
She and Kannan Goundan founded Anrok in 2020. The idea brought together parts of a career that, viewed one job at a time, might have seemed to wander. Water. Government debt. Software investing. Product development. The connecting thread was infrastructure: the arrangements that allow other people to get on with their work.
Water before software
Valentine grew up in Hong Kong and went to Stanford for her undergraduate education. Oxford followed, with a full scholarship for graduate study. Her interests included architecture and water science. Long before the software company, there were questions about how the physical world was organized and sustained.
At Goldman Sachs, she worked with state and local governments on debt backed by tax revenue. That experience gave the word “tax” a purpose beyond an unwelcome addition to a bill. Public services depend on revenues that somebody has to collect. The mechanics might be tedious; their effects are quite tangible.
She later joined Index Ventures, moving into early-stage software investing in 2017. The infrastructure had changed material. Instead of public works, she was considering software businesses and the systems they supplied to other companies. An investor gets to inspect many proposed futures. A founder eventually has to pick one and arrange for it to happen.
A complaint with a market attached
Airtable gave Valentine a closer view of making products. She worked on the applications around its database, including the ecosystem then called Blocks. It also put her in the same company as Goundan, an engineer who had previously worked at Dropbox. They would become Anrok’s co-founders.
Her move toward software came with a willingness to keep studying. A programming coach she hired later became Anrok’s founding engineer. There is something pleasingly practical about that recruitment route. Teaching someone gives them a rather good opportunity to see whether you understand the subject.
Her retrospective explanation of the career is “following curiosity over passion.” The sequence allows expertise to develop before a grand vocational declaration. By 2024, she was also cheerfully clear about the limits of her hands-on involvement: “I do not touch the code today.” Even access to the marketing website code had eventually gone. Growing a company can mean surrendering privileges you once enjoyed.
The tax problem arrived through conversations, rather than a newly discovered affection for forms. Finance teams were dealing with changes in the treatment of online sales. A 2018 Supreme Court decision, South Dakota v. Wayfair, was part of the backdrop. Valentine recognized an opening where public administration and software operations had begun to rub against each other.
In her own account of Anrok’s origins, she describes noticing the problem in 2019. She understood why governments wanted revenue from an economy moving online. She also saw the burden of asking digital businesses to track customer locations and changing requirements. Sympathy for both sides gave her a useful place to begin.
The plumbing behind an invoice
Valentine’s product argument was unusually attentive to the things a business had already chosen. A software company might use different tools for subscriptions, payments and accounting. The tax obligation would still belong to the same business. A useful solution had to make sense of the whole arrangement.
She described this as a modular finance stack. The premise respects a finance team’s freedom to select tools for particular jobs. Anrok would connect to those systems and handle a chain of work: identifying exposure, registration, calculation, filing and payment. The invoice is the visible tip of a much less visible process.
A simplified view of the workflow Valentine set out to connect.
This explains the attraction of a subject that produces so little dinner-party sparkle. The task repeats. It crosses departmental boundaries. It becomes harder to ignore as a business expands. In the article she contributed to a 2024 discussion of SaaS taxes, the practical stakes were clear: failing to collect properly can leave a company paying costs itself and dealing with an expensive cleanup. An administrative omission can reach the economics of the business.
For Valentine, the opportunity lay in making that necessary work fit how software companies actually operated. Their commercial machinery had evolved. The machinery around compliance needed to travel with it.
The money came in; the work multiplied
Anrok’s early backing included investors who already knew Valentine’s work. In a 2024 interview, she described a seed fundraise that moved within 48 hours. The speed belonged to a particular moment, with pitches taking place over Zoom, and to relationships established well before the pitch. The short meeting had a long prehistory.
There were customers to win, too. Goundan’s network helped with the first. Other prospective users responded to outreach even while the company had little public presence. Those replies offered a different kind of evidence from an investor’s enthusiasm: people with the problem were willing to spend time discussing a solution.
The rounds grew. A $20 million Series A brought further backing from Index and Sequoia. In April 2024, Anrok announced a $30 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures. Valentine’s announcement placed the company within a broader digital economy, including streaming, games and AI, where selling internationally could bring a complicated set of local obligations.
Round amounts, not revenue. The 2021 seed is excluded from this comparison.
The October 2025 Series C added $55 million, led by Spark Capital, and brought total funding above $100 million. Anrok said more than 3,000 finance leaders used its platform. Its customers included Anthropic, Cursor and Notion. A company built to manage software’s obligations was now serving businesses helping to change software itself.
Money provides room to hire and build. It also enlarges the job. A company serving more markets has to understand more requirements, support more workflows and keep earning the confidence of customers whose own businesses are changing. Funding announcements put a number on the resources. The operating work continues after the announcement is over.
Invite Murphy to the meeting
Valentine has discussed a planning habit with a name that sounds as though it ought to require a colored belt: Murphyjitsu. Borrowed from the Center for Applied Rationality, it invites a team to imagine how a plan might fail, then work on the causes before the failure arrives.
The appeal is social as well as analytical. A colleague can raise a concern through a shared exercise rather than making an accusation. In one quarterly planning discussion she described, the exercise exposed missing kickoff dates and unclear ownership. A worrying feeling became a scheduling problem the team could fix.
That is a revealing detail about her approach. The useful result is specific. Somebody takes responsibility. A date goes into the plan. The conversation earns its place by changing what happens next.
“You really have to earn your right to go multi-product.”
Michelle Valentine, discussing focus and product-market fit, 2024
Her advice on product expansion carries a similar discipline. Serving one market well is work enough; additional products introduce additional demands. A company’s growth does not release it from learning about customers. It creates more occasions to do so.
AI, with the accounts still open
Valentine was writing about AI for finance teams before every software pitch seemed to require it. In June 2023, her advice was practical: try the assistants, explore what they can help with, and understand their limitations. Outlining a presentation was one example. She also warned about relying on dated information for questions with legal consequences.
By February 2024, she was considering three possible routes for AI in finance: features inside products, agents using existing subscriptions, and custom software made with coding assistants. Her wager favored agents working across tools. The imagined task was recognizably administrative: reconciling transactions, identifying discrepancies and documenting the work.
These were forecasts made at particular dates. What connects them to her earlier work is the attention to systems already in use. A finance team has accounts, records and responsibilities. The proposed technology has to operate within that world. Familiar chores can be a useful test of an unfamiliar invention.
The books beside the business
Her public media shelf makes room for economics, design, poetry and science fiction. Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems appears alongside Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ursula K. Le Guin, Haruki Murakami and Rainer Maria Rilke are there too.
The list gives a small, concrete glimpse beyond the funding rounds. It also resists the idea that every book on a founder’s shelf must teach you to optimize a meeting. Sometimes a spaceship, a poem or an absurd predicament deserves the afternoon.
A different chair, the same company
In early 2026, Brad Silicani announced that he would become Anrok’s CEO, with Valentine moving to Executive Chair. He recalled that their first conversation, lasting half an hour, had convinced him to join forces with her. Years of building followed that brief introduction.
Her current personal site describes another area of attention: helping the transition to powerful AI go well. Investing and thinking about the future remain part of her work. Anrok remains part of the story, with a different seat at the table.
The route from water science to tax software looks less peculiar when you consider what each asks of the person doing it. Understand a system. Find where it fails people. Build something they can use. Valentine found a recurring complaint that others would happily have left to somebody else. Then she volunteered for the paperwork.