An Estonian Artificial Intelligence/machine learning cross-border e-commerce compliance platform, Eurora, has secured $40 million in Series A funding. The oversubscribed financing round was led by Amsterdam-based Connected Capital alongside existing investors, including Change Ventures, Equity United and Eurora’s founder Marko Lastik.
Prior to this, the company raised $3 million funding in July 2021. This round is said to be one of the largest Series A financing rounds raised by Estonian startups.
Expansion plans
The proceeds of this round will be deployed for the geographical expansion of the startup in the UK, the US, and the Middle East. It expects rapid growth in the sector in theee regions. Also, the company will focus on product development and potential add-on acquisitions.
Marko Lastik, the founder and CEO of Eurora Solutions, said: “The number of different declarations, codes, reports, records and tax calculations required in the international shipping business is ever increasing. Without the correct data sets and automated solutions for tax calculations and electronic declarations, cross-border trade has slowed down, resulting in severe delays, fines, increasing costs, loss of customers etc. Eurora’s AI uses 500+ million records of training data from actual transactions from the largest logistics providers in the world, giving Eurora the deepest knowledge of actual market practices. By using Eurora’s platform, merchants can make deliveries faster and at lower costs, which results in increased customer satisfaction and trust.”
Shaffy Roell, Investment Manager at Connected Capital, said: “We are excited to lead the investment into Eurora and actively support the team in scaling the platform globally. The founder and the full management team have impressed us with their quality, domain expertise, and vision for the company. We have seen a clear push from regulators to improve transparency and reporting for the increasing number of goods that enter through customs. We believe that Eurora has built a truly unique AI/ML-based platform, significantly improving compliance while reducing package delays and lowering costs for e-commerce parcels shipped into Europe.”
What issue does it tackle?
In the past decade, global parcel shipping volume increased 3x. As per reports, by 2026, this market is expected to reach over 260 billion parcel deliveries.
Last year, post Brexit, the EU ended the €22 import VAT exemption, and new trading regulations between the EU and the rest of the world came into effect. Complying with this new regulation in the high volume, low value-per-package e-commerce market has been a challenge for merchants and logistics operators from the UK, the US, China and the rest of the world. They are looking for software-based solutions that can help handle the billions of cross-border packages affected by this new EU regulation.
This is where Eurora comes to the play. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically manage cross-border VAT, duty amounts, and declarations.
AI/ML compliance platform
Eurora was founded in 2018 by Marko Lastik in Tallinn. The founder is a global logistics expert with over three decades of experience, mostly connected with Asia. Already, the company has over 200 paying clients worldwide.
Its proprietary AI/ML-based platform automates tax, compliance and customs services. It assigns e-commerce products an appropriate HS code (standardised numerical method for classifying products), calculates the applicable VAT and duty amounts, and automatically creates electronic declarations for EU duties and taxes via simple API integration.
The platform delivers over 96% accuracy for e-commerce packages despite patchy input data and operates at a fraction of the time and price of hybrid or manual code allocation solutions that are commonly used today. Eurora was the first official VAT Intermediary and the first company to issue an IOSS (Import One-Stop Shop) number.
The B2B platform can be used by online sellers, marketplaces, logistics and postal companies, and tax and customs authorities. Eurora’s AI/ML compliance platform can automatically process 5,000 requests per second with up to 96% accuracy, the highest level of accuracy, speed, and automation available on the market.
