The people stuck with this problem aren't tax experts
The average $20M to $500M business manages sales tax filings across 40+ states and a dozen or more countries. Get it wrong and it costs hundreds of thousands to millions in penalties and back taxes. Then come the legal fees to defend the audit, and the nights your controller spends answering Bob at the New York Department of Revenue.
And the responsibility lands on people who never signed up for it.
Your controller. Your VP of Finance. They aren't sales tax experts. Almost nobody is.
They're closing the books every month, running payroll, getting through the annual audit, keeping board reporting straight, and managing income tax filings. Somewhere in the middle of all that, they're also expected to make high-stakes sales tax calls, stretched thin and under-resourced, with this nowhere near the top of the list.
I know because I lived it. In 2023 I was running finance at the fastest-growing school lunch company in America. We'd raised real money and were scaling fast, delivering fresh food to kids and faculty across the country. It turns out sales tax on food sold through schools, across a B2B and B2C model, gets complicated fast. I was the one who had to figure it out, and the sales tax platforms that were supposed to have the answer didn't.
What I actually believe
Every platform can calculate a tax rate. That part is solved.
The hard problem is everything around it. Getting messy, real-world transaction data into a shape where the math even works. Catching the exemption certificate sitting in someone's inbox before it becomes a liability. Handling the state notice that lands the same week your controller is closing the books.
Most tax products, old and new, are built on a shortcut. They assume the inputs are clean and the edge cases are rare. In indirect tax, the edge cases are the job. Get one wrong and you cost a customer money, or hand them an audit. Anyone can automate a tax filing. Few take accountability for compliance. For making sure when the inevitable audit comes — your business is ready.
We built Taxwire for that reality from day zero. Accuracy and depth from the foundation up.
That's the bet.
We built Taxwire for companies that have outgrown their options
Some are stuck in a legacy platform, expensive and opaque, and have been told switching is too painful to bother. Avalara is where most of them are stuck. Others have duct-taped together spreadsheets, a self-serve tool, multiple services firms, and hope, and have hit the ceiling. Either way: a growing pile of filings and edge cases, and no one they trust to own it.
The migration is rarely as painful as they've been told. We've done it 150+ times.
Take Italic. They'd been through the cycle, migrated to TaxJar, switched to Avalara, switched back. On the way back, their historic transaction data got loaded into four states it shouldn't have: New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado. The result: sales overstated, tax overstated, $200K overpaid to four states, and 23 states with no returns filed at all. When they came to us, we unwound it. Recovered the overpayments. Got them compliant everywhere.
"Taxwire found $200K we didn't even know we'd lost, inside the first month. Now I just don't think about sales tax."
What Taxwire actually is
So we built what I wished I'd had. Taxwire is a sales tax platform and a managed service that handles your indirect tax end to end, across every industry, so your finance team can get to a zero-day close and you stop thinking about sales tax.
What you feel as a customer is almost nothing. That's the point. We aim to be the most boring vendor in your stack. You shouldn't have to think about us, and when you do, it's only to see exactly where you stand and why. We keep the lights on. Your inbox stays free of state notices. Your company stays out of audit hell.
Boring is the promise. How we keep it is anything but.
Underneath is an AI-native tax engine. It learns from your own invoices and applies your taxability rules line by line, even when a single order has hundreds of items that each tax differently. When Italic needed to prove $200K in overpayments across four states, the records were already there, transaction by transaction. Every number we file traces back to a source you can put in front of an auditor, not a black-box estimate you take on faith.
It handles the unglamorous parts too. It reads and files your exemption certificates and warns you before one lapses. Your team approves the calls that actually matter, from Slack or email. No portals, no logins.
The software is the engine. The service is the guarantee that it works.
The people betting on this with us
We picked investors who built their own conviction in indirect tax and believed for the right reasons.
"Sales tax is a trust business, and Andrew is the first founder we've seen build for that from the foundation up." – Taylor Brandt, Headline.
Where we're going
Today, Taxwire remits $100M in sales tax a year. Only $4 trillion to go.
This was never meant to be another tool in your stack. It's the infrastructure layer finance teams trust to stay compliant and stay focused on the business, while we own the tax. The goal is simple: power every dollar of sales tax and VAT collected.
This is a trust business. We intend to earn it.
If you're stuck inside a legacy platform and have been told switching isn't worth the pain, send us a note. We've unwound that exact mess 150+ times, and we'll tell you straight whether it's worth it for you.
And if this is the kind of problem you'd want to spend years building, we're hiring.
Much work to do. Onward.
Andrew
