Built for what's next

Not paying sales tax or VAT on behalf of your customers should be the norm for businesses. But for over fifteen years that I've worked in accounting and tax, getting companies to zero has always been an aspiration, or a temporarily elusive win.

The industry is shifting. Today, global tax regulations are catching up to the pace of the digital economy. Companies are launching products faster and almost immediately reaching global customers. And AI is giving finance teams the power to access, analyze, and action on data in real time.

For as long as businesses have dealt with sales tax and VAT, compliance operated periodically. At the end of a period, the finance team would look back on the past year, quarter, or month to figure out what happened and what accruals need to be made for any errors or gaps in collection. This was accepted because the speed of commerce was slow. When a business looked to expand, it took multiple quarters of work to start selling in new markets. On the regulatory side, it took even longer for governments to perform audits to figure out if businesses were complying and finally address audits years later.

None of that is true anymore, and businesses and most compliance platforms haven't caught up.

The world sped up

Today, governments are racing to update global tax regulations that were built for a world of brick-and-mortar businesses to match the digital economy. New e-invoicing laws require businesses to submit individual transactions to the government in real time for compliance checks. California has rewritten its tax code to address software for the first time. And tax authorities everywhere have access to use AI in their audit approaches, allowing them to parse huge volumes of data and multiple data indicators to drive audit detection.

At the same time, business growth has accelerated. AI coding tools have massively collapsed the amount of time it takes to go from idea to product launch. It used to take a decade to grow from $0 to $1 billion in revenue. Now software companies can achieve that milestone in as little as two years. With the software tools we have available, companies can go from product launch to a fully global audience in what feels like seconds.

The gap between the speed of business growth and the speed companies handle compliance has never been wider. The traditional approach forces businesses to figure out when and where to comply with sales tax and VAT months or quarters after the fact. Legacy tax engines were built for a less globalized, and solely brick-and-mortar world. Accounting firm partners send CSV files in versions back and forth, each with its own reconciliation. All of this slows processes down and can introduce manual process errors, which puts businesses at risk to lose more money to tax non-compliance.

Accruals from exposures and missed invoices mean companies pay cash to jurisdictions across the globe. In other words, hard-fought customer wins or fundraising from investors is paid out to a jurisdiction because it wasn't added to a customer invoice.

These forces expose a tax landscape that was built for an era when tax was periodic, growth was linear, and AI didn't exist. That era is over.

AI has given finance teams the ability to query, access, and analyze data faster than they ever have before. The traditional software workflow of logging into a web app, finding the right page, running a prebuilt report, exporting it and then stitching together versions of Excel files over hours and days is being replaced. Now, MCPs that connect data from financial systems can be reviewed and actioned on in seconds.

The platform we're building

We're building Anrok for what comes next. Our single platform handles every compliance obligation across the globe by default in real time. This enables businesses to eliminate the out-of-pocket costs of compliance gaps, including paying sales tax and VAT on behalf of their customers.

The architecture has three components required to get businesses to zero and stay there.

First, a single source of truth and complete execution for sales tax and VAT. Every compliance obligation is connected to a transaction and all of the contextual and execution data that it derived from, from when and where the jurisdiction required compliance through to the delivery of payment on the return. That means no handoffs between disparate applications, shuffling CSV versions via email, or remembering to manually save data to a folder. Just one login to execute and access the entire workflow.

Second, access every global market by default. A new market is no longer a journey of expert network consultations and retrospective cleanups on thresholds that were crossed in silence and generated liabilities. You have access to immediate notification on new compliance obligations across every market your business is in or may grow into. You can register, calculate, file, e-invoice, and remit before a collection obligation becomes an expense.

Third, a tax intelligence engine offers real-time decision-making across any surface. Choose a traditional web application or agents that run across an entire finance tech stack. No matter the surface area that triggers an action or query, the answer comes back instantly, accurately, and with full context of the entire compliance lifecycle. Data and action aren't triggered by a quarter-end reconciliation of CSVs. It's instantly surfaced, decided, and executed wherever you work.

With these components, your business has the ability to reach zero. Because every dollar owed is collected, sales tax and VAT stop becoming a conversation about accrual liabilities and pay outs for missed gaps. Instead of discounting customers through missed tax collection, your business can use its cash on growth.

Why it matters

Tax leaders at Anthropic, Cursor, and Notion are all running on Anrok. Not because it's incrementally better than what they had before, but because their alternatives are not built for how they actually operate.

The old model treated tax non-compliance as a cost of doing business because the technology was built for a world that ran on a delay. Every dollar uncollected and paid as an expense on behalf of a customer is a dollar that otherwise could have been invested in growth and productivity for the business. That's the problem Anrok solves. Every dollar owed is collected at the moment of the transaction, zero paid in expense. Getting businesses to zero and staying there.