The startup trying to make sales tax disappear - by owning the whole problem, not handing you a dashboard.
FOUNDED 2023 · CO-FOUNDERS ANDREW REA & STEVEN SCHMATZ · ~23 PEOPLE
TAXWIRE
The company's shield-mark, rendered in forest green. Photographed for the file - New York, New York.
Sales tax is the kind of problem most founders would rather not think about, which is precisely why Taxwire built a company around it. The New York fintech takes over indirect tax - sales tax in the United States, value-added tax abroad - and runs it end to end for finance teams that would otherwise lose weekends to it.
The mechanics are deceptively broad. Taxwire monitors where a business creates a tax obligation, registers it in the right jurisdictions, calculates the correct rate at checkout, files the returns, remits the money, and defends the customer when an auditor comes calling. It does this across roughly 22,000 US tax jurisdictions and more than 100 countries.
What sets the pitch apart is the posture. Most software in the category hands customers a dashboard and wishes them luck. Taxwire takes responsibility for the outcome, pairing an AI-native tax engine with a team of human tax experts. The company already remits about $100 million in sales tax a year on behalf of its customers.
The bet is that indirect tax should be infrastructure - something a company hands off entirely and stops managing on its own. In a system with more than 10,000 US jurisdictions and no single federal referee, that is a large surface area to promise to cover.
"The entire global indirect tax system is edge cases compounded upon edge cases. And you cost your customers money and/or create liability if you get it wrong."
Taxwire's users are mid-market finance and accounting teams - software and SaaS companies, e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands, and manufacturers. These are businesses big enough to have real tax exposure across many states and countries, but rarely big enough to staff a full indirect-tax department.
The pain they hand over is fragmentation. Every jurisdiction has its own rules, rates, thresholds, and definitions of what is even taxable. A product that is exempt in one state is taxed in the next. Multi-line invoices, unusual product categories, and back-filings for prior years turn a routine task into a standing liability.
Named customers span the range: Omni, Essor - whose head of tax manages 16 entities and roughly 4,000 returns a year - Spellbook, serving customers in 80-plus countries, and AssetWatch, with exposure across 30 states. Notably, about half of Taxwire's new customers arrive after leaving a legacy provider.
Real-time, geocoded rate calculation built for messy cases - multi-line invoices and products that don't map to a standard category.
A team of tax experts handling nexus studies, registrations, filings, remittance, and audit resolution end to end.
Continuous tracking of where a business owes tax, plus full nexus studies and compliance audits across jurisdictions.
Registration management, historical back-filings and amendments, and one-click future registrations.
Automated monthly and quarterly returns and payments, with anomalies flagged before a return is filed.
A virtual mailbox that captures and manages government mail and tax notices on the customer's behalf.
Native links to QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Shopify, and Amazon, with expert support over Slack.
The incumbents in indirect tax - Avalara, TaxJar, Stripe Tax, Anrok, Sovos, Vertex - largely sell tooling. They calculate rates and produce reports, and the responsibility for filing correctly stays with the customer. Taxwire's argument is that a dashboard is not a product when the liability is yours.
Rather than adopting a "move fast and break things" posture, the company says it built its data model for the edge cases from day one instead of retrofitting later. That choice is slower and less glamorous, but in a domain where an error costs real money, it is the whole point. A rough read on the market positioning:
Bars illustrate positioning on the "hand it off entirely" spectrum, not measured market share.
Taxwire operates as B2B SaaS layered with a managed service: customers pay to have their sales tax and VAT compliance run for them, combining subscription software with hands-on expert work. The sweet spot is mid-market companies roughly in the $20M to $500M revenue range - large enough to feel the pain, not large enough to build the function in-house.
The credibility comes from the team. Taxwire's ~23 people include engineers who previously built tax infrastructure at Stripe, TaxJar, Fonoa, EY, and Avalara, working alongside former state tax auditors. It is a small group of people who have already made the expensive mistakes somewhere else.
Chief executive Andrew Rea came to the problem honestly, having run finance at a fast-growing school lunch company and been buried by multi-state sales tax. He has said, only half-joking, that he told investors building tax software was his "manifest destiny."
"Anyone can calculate a tax rate. The hard problem is everything around it."
"Building tax software is my manifest destiny."
In 2026, Taxwire raised $25 million across combined Seed and Series A financing, led by Headline. Notably, every investor in the round was already on the cap table and chose to add more.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed + Series A (combined) | $25,000,000 | June 2026 | Headline (lead), Vinyl, Recall Capital, Nomo Ventures, Analog Ventures, XYZ, and hundreds of angels |
Andrew Rea begins building the company, driven by his own experience with multi-state sales tax complexity.
Steven Schmatz joins as CTO; Taxwire publicly launches and begins onboarding its first customers in November.
Taxwire raises $25M led by Headline to scale its fully managed AI tax platform across 100+ countries.