Built in Boston, scaling in the AI era
Jellyfish has spent the better part of a decade answering one deceptively hard question: what is your engineering team actually delivering for the business?
Founded in 2017 and built in Boston, it has become the leading software engineering intelligence platform, the platform that R&D leaders at companies like DraftKings, LastPass, and Blue Yonder use to turn fragmented engineering data into business outcomes. As AI rewrites how software gets shipped, that visibility has only grown more valuable.
Jessica has had a front-row seat for the climb. She joined as the second hire after the CFO, back when Jellyfish looked more like a startup than a company.
"We basically had a consultant paying our bills. We didn't really have a finance team when we started."
Five years later, Jellyfish has scaled dramatically. The 700 customers are real, the investor list is real, and the audits are real. And Jessica is the corporate controller running it all with a deliberately lean team.
Her job, in her words, is to decide which systems work and which ones don't. Tax was one of the last pieces to fall into place.
Before Anrok: a tax engine built for boxes, not software
Jellyfish started on Avalara. For a SaaS business, it never quite fit.
The system kept reaching for the wrong codes. In places like Chicago and Illinois, it wasn't calculating the right tax. It assumed a company with inventory and tangible goods, not subscriptions. Filing frequencies turned into a guessing game. And when something broke, there was nobody to call.
"We're software, we're SaaS, and it really doesn't do a great job with that. We couldn't ever get in touch with anyone at support. We really needed somebody to hold our hand a little bit more."
So she did what finance leaders actually do. She asked around. At conferences across Boston, she started asking other operators who they used. The same name kept coming back.
"It wasn't me Google searching who to use. It was definitely word of mouth."
After three or four people pointed her to Anrok, the decision was made.
Onboarding: live without the lift
The switch is usually where tax projects go to die. This one didn't.
Jellyfish dropped in its employee roster, dropped in its sales data, and Anrok did the rest. The exercise doubled as a fresh nexus study. Along the way, the team found a few states where it should have already been filing. "It was so easy," Jessica says.
The one genuinely tricky part lived inside NetSuite, where Jellyfish runs an older billing setup and sells through the Amazon marketplace. Getting NetSuite to treat marketplace sales correctly was, in her words, a nightmare. Anrok's team walked her through it anyway.
"The support team doesn't even own that system, and they still helped us get it up and running."
The integration took one pass. Jessica connected it herself, an admin task she handled like the others on her stack. "We've never had to redo it since that day."
The lean-team dividend
Jellyfish is roughly half remote, and hiring everywhere. That means it triggers exposure not just on revenue thresholds, but on where its team physically sits. New state, new obligation. For a small finance team, that is exactly the kind of thing that quietly becomes a full-time job.
Anrok made it a non-event. Jessica runs the function with one senior and an FP&A team, none of whom have the hours to track thresholds by hand. So they don't.
"It's not something we notice. It just always works."
The work that once justified a dedicated hire now runs in the background.
"Not having to pay somebody to set that up, having it all accessible right there, that's a huge save for us."
Audit-ready, by default
Then the audits came. State sales tax audits, all at the same time.
This is the moment most finance teams dread, and the moment Jellyfish's switch paid off. Massachusetts is auditing one period that ran on Avalara and one that ran on Anrok, which makes the contrast impossible to miss. The Avalara-era records weren't built to answer an auditor's questions. "We were just pulling the standard return. We didn't think to save the data," Jessica says.
The Anrok period has been a different experience entirely.
"We can see, by customer, the actual sales invoice amount and the tax associated with it, including the tax rates."
For states like Texas, where the rate changes county by county, that line-level detail is the difference between a clean response and a scramble. In the middle of two audits, Jessica's verdict on Anrok is one word: clutch.
One platform, data on demand
Jessica still runs her own reconciliation, by state, as she files. She wants her returns and payments to tie to her sales tax payable accounts, on her terms. Anrok doesn't get in the way of that, it feeds it. She pulls the data she needs and reconciles where she wants.
The platform also holds onto detail her other systems lose. When a customer relocates, say from Florida to New York, most systems only show where that customer sits today. Anrok records where they were at the time of every return.
"It's very simple for us to go in and say, this invoice was sent here, and here's why."
Run a flat customer list and that history vanishes. Inside Anrok, the rate is locked to the moment, and the answer is always one query away.
What's next: borderless
Jellyfish has expanded globally. It sells into Canada, the UK, and beyond, and it has crossed the point where flying under the radar stops being a strategy.
"As we continue to expand globally, we’re focused on strengthening our international tax compliance so we can stay ahead of changing requirements."
Borderless compliance is the next chapter, and it is already on the agenda for Jessica's next conversation with her Anrok team. She is also among the first to test Anrok Atlas, the agentic tax partner now in early access, built to pull the reports and answer the questions she runs by hand today.
For now, the story is simpler than that. Jellyfish set out to build a finance stack where every system earns its place. Tax used to be the part that fought back. Now it is the part nobody thinks about.
That is the point.
.png)
.png)
