In 2020 I was on hold with tax authorities for hours trying to run my last startup. Trade compliance was brutal unless you had $50k for advisors.
That's why we built Sphere.
Today: On track to 10x growth, customers like @Lovable, @Deel, @ClickUp, @WeAreLegora, and a Series A led by @a16z.
Our customers never wanted another sales tax tool. They need one layer for all of global trade compliance.
So that's what we built. Multi-product: Output tax, Input tax, E-invoicing / Live-reporting, Customs & withholding tax to come.
Powered by our AI tax engine TRAM.
Fast becoming the standard for global trade compliance.
Check it out 👇
getsphere.com
Every agent demo on X looks incredible until you try to ship it. We're getting 30 engineers in a room to show what's actually working.
Pizza, beer, @get_sphere HQ. March 19 → rebrand.ly/agent9d7a58
This gentleman below is Douglas North.
He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 for showing that economic performance is determined by institutions, not just technology or capital
His definition - institutions are the rules, laws, and enforcement mechanisms that structure exchange.
When they reduce the cost of transacting, markets grow.
When they don't, markets stall.
International tax compliance is a transaction cost.
190+ countries, each with its own rules, rates, thresholds, exemptions, filing schedules, penalties. The rules are fragmented across hundreds of legal systems, dozens of languages, constantly changing.
North would call this an institutional failure. Not because the rules are bad, but because accessing and interpreting them is so expensive that it distorts behavior.
Companies avoid markets, delay expansion, eat penalties they didn't see coming.
The pattern - every major reduction in transaction costs unlocks a step-change in trade. Containers for physical goods. SWIFT for money. Stripe for payments.
The transaction costs at the compliance layer are still there.
What we are building at @get_sphere will remove them.
The Dog is strong in this one.
Very excited to be working with Andrew Jackey as Founding AE in the US.
Wrap sheet 👇️
🤝 Joins us from fellow fintech @ycombinator company @usetesorio - strong expertise and track record selling to the CFO.
📊 Ex @cartainc before that working across SMB, mid market and enterprise
🧳 Before that IBD and finance degree at UCSB
As I've said before, @get_sphere's GTM team is a force to reckon with.
A lot of companies treat in-office as a policy to enforce. We see it slightly differently.
Firstly, we choose to be in-office in SF because it has a gravitation pull. There's a density of ideas, people and pure ambition. It's an ecosystem where ideas that change the world are built and the talent to execute on that are here (or want to be). Our customers are here, other founders are here, the best engineers are here. The location isn't a compromise. It's the point.
Secondly, proximity (especially in engineering / product teams) creates collisions that async can't replicate. The best ideas at Sphere don't come from scheduled syncs. They come from someone overhearing a conversation and having the answer. A five-minute whiteboard session routinely saves three days of back-and-forth. Remote works for certain kinds of problems. Our engineering problems aren't that kind.
Thirdly, it's just more fun. We work hard and we want to be able to have a chinwag on a Friday that's not related to tax.
All that said, people have families. People have lives. We understand that. I built Sphere while trying to raise twins.
I've been seeing a fairly toxic culture amongst some startups lately where they force people to stay in office (either to a certain time or for 6-7 days a week). I personally believe if you treat people like kids, guess what, you're going to hire kids.
Our expectation is outcomes — monthly KRs, clear ownership, high standards.
Don't get me wrong, people dedicate themselves to their work here and it would be impossible to achieve the goals we set on a 9 to 5.
But we don't have an office to babysit our employees, we have an office to foster presence and focus.
Presence makes the work better.
Deel solved how companies pay people around the world. We're solving how companies sell compliantly 190+ countries.
Deel was founded in 2019.
Six years later: $1B+ revenue run rate, 35,000 customers, 1.25 million workers on their platform, $17.3B valuation.
They proved that compliance infrastructure is a massive, venture-scale category.
But Deel solved one side of the ledger: employer-side global compliance. Payroll, benefits, contracts. How companies pay people across borders.
The other side of the ledger is revenue-based compliance: sales tax, e-invoicing, tariffs. How companies charge across borders. That's what we built Sphere for.
Deel is actually a Sphere customer. They solved the paying-people problem. They came to us for the cross-border sales problem.
And interestingly we share a lot of parallels:
✅️ We both built with an international focus from day one (vs competitors who built for US with international as an afterthought)
✅️ We are building compound startups (multiple compliance / product areas under the one platform)
✅️ Our leadership teams come from very international backgrounds
The compliance infrastructure market has many facets to it. Different problems. that happen to share the same customers.
And it's only becoming more essential as companies go global faster and faster.
We're hiring for a Founding Recruiter at Sphere.
This would be someone who would work directly with me and Alex Bowcut.
You'll be building out our SF-based eng team, scaling our global GTM hires and setting up the right processes and systems before we go turbo.
Must haves:
Early stage recruiting experience in technical domains
Strong networks within engineering communitieis (ideally in SF)
Get sh#@t done mentality
Able to withstand Australian accents
Enquire within
Every layer of global commerce has been solved by software.
Except one.
@stripe solved payments. @flexport solved logistics. @deel solved payroll. But compliance - the rules that govern what you owe when you sell across a border - is still a patchwork of consultants, spreadsheets and guesswork.
There's a reason it's last.
Payments has largely been commoditized. A dollar moves the same way whether you're sending it to London or Lagos. Logistics can be optimized. A shipping container is a shipping container. But compliance doesn't work like that. You can't standardize it, because every country's tax rules are an expression of its sovereignty.
Brazil taxes software differently than Germany does. India's GST regime looks nothing like Japan's consumption tax. And here's the thing - there isn't a whole lot of alignment.
That’s because every tax code is that country codifying its own economic priorities, cultural values, and political environments. What gets taxed, what is exempt, what gets incentivized - those are policy choices that reflect what a society actually cares about.
This is, essentially, a complex adaptive system: 190+ countries, all acting as independent players, all changing their rules on their own timelines for their own reasons and in responses to each other. One country raises a threshold. Another introduces a new digital services tax. A third rewrites its e-invoicing requirements. None of them are coordinating with each other. And every change ripples out and interacts with every other change in ways that nobody planned for.
If you’ve worked on problems like weather modeling or autonomous driving - systems where you can’t just map the state of the world once and call it done, where the environment is changing while you’re trying to understand it - that’s the kind of problem this is.
The engineering challenge at @get_sphere is building a system that understands all of these different regimes - really understands them, not just stores them - and can reason about how they apply to any given transaction, even as the rules themselves are changing.
This is, by a wide margin, the hardest problem I’ve ever worked on.
Nick Rudder retweeted
So, @get_sphere is hiring a Founding Growth Lead in SF right now.
You’ll work closely with @nrudder_ (founder/CEO) to help amplify the team’s brand, build out direct & partner channels, establish Sphere’s presence in international markets, and more.
Lmk if you’re interested.
jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere/5210…
Nick Rudder retweeted
Ep #241 on The High Flyers Podcast is now live!
Meet Nick Rudder — Founder & CEO of Sphere.
This is the story of Nick Rudder and Sphere:
Startup collapse.
Co-founder leaves.
Twins arrive early.
The company gets rebuilt from hospital rooms.
$25M Series A led by @a16z!
Yup.
Nick chats with me about:
▪️ Adaptability as an edge from growing up in EU/AUS
▪️ Losing a co-founder and rebuilding solo
▪️ Building Sphere from hospital rooms
▪️ How CFO discovery revealed broken tax system
▪️ What actually drives Sphere’s customer retention
▪️ Lessons from YC and Aussie vs US work culture
▪️How he US$25M Series A led by a16z
…and more.
____
🎧 Listen here: curiositycentre.com/the-high…
@nrudder_ @get_sphere @ycombinator @garrytan @aaron_epstein @mandrusko1 @david__booth @eriktorenberg @melanie_galang @HarryStebbings
This year has been monumental for Sphere and we wouldn't be where we are without a team that goes to battle every single day.
💸 Over a $1bn in transactions processed
📈 13x YoY revenue growth
🌍️ Local rails into 100+ regions globally
✨️ Onboarded some of the fastest growing companies in the world including Lovable, Replit, Deel, Eleven Labs, Linktree + many more
🤝 $21m raised from Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Felicis, 20VC
I saw a post recently about how in person teams most effectively create "foxhole dynamics".
I wouldn't want to be in the foxhole with anybody else.
Sphere put together a list of finance, accounting and tax roles at some of the hottest companies in the world.
If you're looking for your next challenge check out the open positions in the link below 👇️
If it's useful, drop us a comment below and we'll keep the list updated every month.
bit.ly/3X20fxx
Building an AI-powered system that ingests, codifies and monitors the world's tax law is no easy feat. It has never been done before.
In our whitepaper on how we built TRAM (Tax Review and Assessment Model), our AI Lead, @bowcut_a, steps through:
🌍️ How we built the world's first AI-native tax engine
🪜 The steps TRAM takes to balance accuracy with scalability
🔍️ How we evaluate TRAMs outputs, and
🏰 TRAM's moat and how it improves over time
If you want to build systems that are at the forefront of AI and international trade, @bowcut_a is looking for someone to join his team
Whitepaper: getsphere.com/blog/building-…
AI Engineer role: jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere/4e3c…
On the back of our Series A from @a16z, I want to sound the conch to my fellow Australians in the tech and startup space 🇦🇺🐚
If you are an Aussie who wants to move to SF - which let's face it, is still the absolute epicentre of AI / tech - then @get_sphere will sponsor your visa and pay for your relocation.
The Aussie mafia here is strong.
Your career will hit an inflection point.
Come be a part of it 💪
Nick Rudder retweeted
What’s your story of running on fumes and refusing to give up?
Definitely one of the more memorable interviews I've done!
Congrats to @get_sphere on their $21m series A led by a16z!
People see the flashy headline, but @nrudder_ has one of the toughest stories of grit and determination I’ve seen at YC. Even people that believed in him in his last business left the company for dead.
The journey to Series A at @get_sphere was a deeply personal one for me and this interview I did with @aaron_epstein is the unfiltered version.
People say that you should seperate work from your personal life, but when you're a founder they're inextricably linked. A crisis on either side ripples into the other.
I hate lines like "we're just getting started" because the truth is, most founders go through a valley of pain before they get to any sort of validation.
Yes, there's always a long road ahead and you should never become complacent - but the struggle should be acknowledged.
Enjoy.
.@get_sphere has raised a $21M Series A, led by
@a16z, to build the world's first AI-native tax engine 🌎
There are two diametrically opposed forces that are coming to a head right now - companies are going global faster than ever but cross border compliance is becoming more and more complex.
Current tax compliance products on the market can't scale globally because:
1. They do their tax research manually (which is inefficient, slow and prone to error)
2. They outsource data transmission to tax authorities via local service partners (no automation, manual back and forth with 3rd parties, exorbitant fees).
Sphere has completely changed that.
Our AI native tax engine collects, codifies and monitors tax law globally and our 100+ local rails into tax authorities fully automates the compliance lifecycle end to end.
And indirect tax is just the start. What Deel did for global payroll compliance, Sphere is doing for revenue-based compliance.
This round plants the flag in the ground for a new type of cross-border compliance system - one that leverages AI to understand the granular complexity of tax law and apply it to the product catalog of any business.
A huge thank you to all our customers - including global companies like @Lovable, @elevenlabs, @Replit, @runwayml and @deel.
A massive shout out to our investors who have come on somewhat of a non-linear journey -
@mandrusko1, @a16z, @ycombinator, @felicis, @HarryStebbings, @20vcFund, @pioneer_fund, @mejiasebas, @RichAberman + many more.
And most importantly a nod to my team, who is in the trenches with me every day, and my family, without whom we wouldn't be where we are.
If you're going global, go with @get_sphere
One of our most exciting clients, @ideogram_ai, dropped a number of epic new features today!
Check them out 👇 @mo_norouzi @humphreysu
Today, we're releasing a major upgrade to Ideogram 3.0: enhanced realism, more versatile styles, improved prompt following, and greater diversity.
You can now use Magic Fill and Extend with 3.0 in Ideogram Canvas to edit both uploaded and generated images.
Ideogram 3.0 is finally available on our API at developer.ideogram.ai
ALT Prompt: A grainy, snapshot-style phone portrait captures a young man with a short, neatly trimmed beard and warm, hazel eyes filled with a gentle melancholy as he gazes directly into the camera. He wears a simple, well-worn gray t-shirt and a delicate silver chain necklace that subtly reflects the soft light, his expression conveying quiet introspection and vulnerability. Behind him, a softly blurred urban backdrop reveals a weathered brick wall bathed in the diffused amber glow of a distant streetlamp, with a faded poster in the corner reading “"Major Ideogram 3.0 Upgrade"”. The composition is intimate and authentic, creating a nostalgic feel akin to a cherished memory caught in the dim light of a quiet city evening.
ALT Prompt: A moody portrait photograph with a deep blue monochromatic color scheme. The subject has short blonde hair and is wearing small white flowers in their hair. The lighting creates a soft, ethereal glow around their figure, with the background fading to a rich navy blue. The image has a dreamy, blurred quality with the subject's features slightly out of focus. The composition is centered, with the subject's face and upper body filling most of the frame. The blue lighting creates a cool, atmospheric mood and casts subtle shadows across the subject's features. The photograph has a professional studio quality with careful attention to lighting and composition. The depth of field is shallow, creating a soft bokeh effect in the background.
ALT Prompt: close-up portrait through window bars. elderly Asian woman with white hair, warm smile. dark jacket, light blue collar. vintage lace curtain with floral pattern in light blue and white. natural lighting creates soft shadows. vertical metal bars divide the view. warm muted color palette, sepia tones. intimate documentary composition.
ALT Prompt: A grainy, low-resolution selfie-style phone shot captures a young man with stubble and kind eyes. He is looking directly at the camera with a slightly apprehensive expression, his dark hair tousled and falling across his forehead. The background is a dimly lit, cluttered apartment corner with a glimpse of a worn bookshelf and a partially visible poster reading “"Lost Signals"”. The lighting is harsh and unflattering, emphasizing the raw, unedited nature of the snapshot.