In April 2022, Eurora closed a €37 million Series A round from Connected Capital, Equity United, and Change Ventures. The funds will be used for product development, potential add-on acquisitions and geographical expansion in the UK, the Middle East, and the US, where further rapid growth in the sector is expected.
Eurora, founded in 2018 by Marko Lastik, a global logistics expert with over 30 years of experience, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically manage cross-border value added tax (VAT), duty amounts, and declarations. Eurora’s solution platform is used by more than 250 clients to send millions of parcels daily.
Eurora’s new solutions centre is focused on AI/ML research but will also support the platform’s ongoing development and adaptation to future legislative changes to international trade.
With 30 data scientists and machine-learning engineers already on board in Tartu, Eurora plans to increase the headcount of the new centre to 60 experts. The startup employs over 165 people in 18 countries, with close to 100 open positions to be filled by the end of 2022.
Solving logistics, globally
In July last year, the EU ended the €22 import VAT exemption, and new trading regulations between the EU and the rest of the world came into effect.
Many companies are already struggling to comply with the current regulations, especially if they are under-investing in their technology stack. Eurora plans to solve those struggles. Its platform already verifies the accuracy of parcel data, and its functionality can easily be extended to verify compliance with transport security or product safety.
“Processing large volumes of data is a core requirement in international trade,” notes Marko Lastik, the founder and Group CEO of Eurora. “In order to efficiently automate cross-border e-commerce duties and tax declarations, the implementation of data science and machine learning is needed,” Lastik explains.
Using AI and ML, Eurora’s B2B compliance platform automatically processes 5,000 requests per second with up to 98% accuracy. Its AI uses over 500 million training data records from actual transactions of the world’s largest logistics service providers.
The platform can be used by online sellers, marketplaces, logistics, and postal companies to automate tax and duty declarations and assign the appropriate HS code. It operates at a fraction of the time and price of hybrid or manual code allocation solutions commonly used today.
There’s a significant demand to back new expansion and future-proof the platform. Moreover, as the European Commission plans to introduce new legislation to add product safety and transport security compliance requirements to cross-border trade, the new rules need to be supported by Eurora as well.
“We work daily to bring new products and services to the international market,” says Kaie Hansson, the Head of Eurora’s Innovation and Research Centre.
“One of the research areas will be the application of new language groups. For example, Chinese, French or Spanish have different syntaxes of languages, conventions of descriptions, use of punctuation marks, presence of symbols and position of important words in the description. All this requires the machine to make thousands of decisions to classify the goods accurately and calculate the correct taxes based on the destination country,” Hansson explains.
Additionally, similar legislative changes will also be introduced in Singapore from 2023, which means, Eurora shall open an office there in October.
In recent months, Eurora has already opened a UK Central office in London and a US Central office in Miami, in addition to a series of high-level appointments. In October, Eurora plans to open an Engineering Hub in Dubai.
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