Sam Ross

I’m thrilled to share that @numeral has raised a $35M Series B, led by Mayfield, at a $350M valuation! Turns out, sales tax and VAT have gotten so complex that we need AI and millions of dollars in VC funding to make it simple again. This brings us to $57M in funding, including our $18 million Series A led by Benchmark Capital in March of this year. We are 1,057 days into building Numeral, and I’m humbled to say that we’ve processed over $5 billion in transaction volume, filed 150,000 sales tax returns for +2,000 paying customers, and achieved 3.5x year-over-year revenue growth. Numeral is the end-to-end platform for sales tax and VAT compliance. I couldn't be prouder of what we’ve accomplished… but there's still a lot left to build, many new customers to serve, and a heck of a lot more sales tax filings to, well, file. So what’s next? Global coverage: Growing internationally? Our in-house platform currently covers 60+ countries, and we are expanding to many more by the end of the year. Integrations: As you may have noticed, we’ve launched several new integrations over the last few months, including with Orb, Sequence, Tabs, and others. Some exciting integrations to come! Automation: Could Numeral be the most boring AI company? Our AI may not be the flashiest, but our automations mean you'll never have to log into a government portal or listen to hold music again. Our team: We are currently hiring for multiple roles across our organization. Ready to join us? Matt and I are incredibly grateful to our customers and team. Thank you for making this milestone possible. And a special thank you to our wonderful investors: @MayfieldFund, @SPangulur, @benchmark, @chetanp, @ycombinator, @gustaf, @uncorkcap, @susanwliu, @FundersClub, @mittal, @mantisVC, @AlexPallNY, @ShaanVP, @lennysan, @moizali, @mrsharma, @ringmybeller, @khency6, @asturnerr, @maariabajwa, and so many others.

In Australian GST, everyone assumes the merchant carries the liability. BUT sometimes it ends up with the company that just moved the box. Say an Australian customer buys low-value goods from an overseas merchant. The merchant doesn’t ship directly - a redeliverer steps in, forwarding the package into Australia. If the merchant or marketplace has already handled GST, that’s the end of it. But when neither has, the obligation can move downstream to the redeliverer. Not the merchant or the marketplace. The forwarding company. The part that catches operators off guard is where the liability can end up. You’d expect it to sit with whoever sold the goods. But if the seller/platform isn’t the one handling GST, the obligation can follow the fulfillment flow. Worth keeping in mind as more ecommerce brands experiment with fulfillment setups, forwarding flows, and cross-border logistics.

if you’re not paying attention, there’s been a rise of a specific kind of 2026 employee who cannot write an email without consulting three LLM models I respect the commitment to process

@immieats switched to @Numeral They had another vendor - software was running, filings were going out. Then they started adding it up: late filings that had already triggered penalties, one incorrect return that resulted in $5,700 more paid in taxes than they actually owed, and a support team that wasn't reachable when anything went wrong. And that's before counting the penalties or the time spent figuring out what happened and how to fix it. Most operators assume they're fine because something is running. That's usually where the expensive surprises are hiding.

@willnitze Hi @willnitze - sorry to hear that. Will DM you. My DMs are open to anyone!

What are good alternatives to Numeral for sales tax? Their customer service / responsiveness is God awful.

Nothing has made software feel more alive than watching people develop loyalty, resentment, and emotional dependency toward specific models. People talk about Claude and ChatGPT the way previous generations talked about coworkers. “This used to be really good.” “It’s still useful, but I need to phrase things carefully.” “I don’t trust it with anything high stakes.” “It was incredible last month. No idea what happened.”

Fishwife got named one of Time’s Most Influential Food and Drink Companies of 2026. Very deserved. They took tinned fish and made it feel like something you’d bring to a dinner party. Beautiful tins, great flavors, a cookbook, the whole thing. The funny thing with good brands is that once they work, the idea feels obvious. Of course tinned fish could be premium. Of course it could be giftable. Of course it could sit next to wine and nice bread and not feel like emergency food. But someone had to actually make it feel that way. Very cool to see. Proud they’re a Numeral customer. Also the cookbook is great.

One thing AI has done very successfully is expose how much modern work is just moving text between boxes.

A big thank you to Becca, Art, and Karsten for spending a few days with @numeral. Incredibly grateful to work with Fishwife, Brex, and Character AI.

The funniest AI flex is when someone says they automated their workflow Then you ask one follow-up question and discover the system still depends on them remembering to click one weird button every Tuesday

@YacineSibous Heroic effort - fintech is playing on hard mode

Well, that was a crazy turn of events. Three weeks ago, I thought Parker was going to be acquired in a deal worth nearly $90M. Yesterday, we filed for Chapter 7. I spent most of my twenties building Parker. We went from an idea in YC to processing over $1B in annualized volume, pioneered products that became standard across fintech, and built something I believed could last for decades. And now it’s over. I know there’s going to be speculation about why Parker failed, but a lot of what’s being said online is simply not accurate. Over the last few years, we faced leadership turnover, a much tougher market, slowing growth, and the realities of trying to scale a venture-backed business after momentum fades. Earlier this year, we decided the best path forward was to pursue a sale of the business. We ran a process and spent months working toward a potential acquisition that ultimately did not close. After that, things moved quickly. The hardest part is the impact on the people involved: •Customers dealing with disruption •Employees losing jobs they worked hard for •Investors who believed in us losing money What I am proud of is the team. Parker was built by incredibly talented people who deserved a better outcome than this. Helping them land somewhere great is my top priority right now. If you’re hiring operators, engineers, designers, finance, credit, or growth talent, please reach out. To everyone who believed in Parker over the years: thank you.

I’ve been using miso.com for months - it’s amazing and I can’t imagine not having it

My favorite genre of AI founder is the guy who has: An agent to write emails An agent to summarize calls An agent to plan his day An agent to review his agent’s work A human manually filing sales tax in Ohio Brother.

Pax Historia might be the most fun company in YC W26. An alternate-history fever dream with a strategy game underneath. You pick a country, pick a year, and start committing crimes against the timeline. Maybe Rome never falls, the USSR refuses to collapse, Genghis Khan gets another generation, and the Cold War finds a way to become everyone’s problem. @Eli_BullockPapa and @ryzhang22 built the kind of game that makes you open one tab to play and twelve more to check whether your completely deranged historical theory is technically possible. Chaotic, nerdy, and extremely fun. 35,000+ people a day are already in there rewriting history. Very cool company. Rooting for the whole Pax Historia team.

what’s with the sass, Claude?

The moon does not have sales tax. Yet. No Department of Revenue. No nexus threshold. No archaic filing portals. Incredible place to do business, honestly. But give humans enough time and we'll ruin it. The moment someone sells freeze-dried ice cream from a lunar gift shop, the questions start. Where is the seller based? Where's the buyer located, and does the transaction happen where the server is, where the goods ship from, or where they land? Which of the thousands of jurisdictions on Earth gets to claim a piece of a sale that technically occurred on the moon? And how long before some state publishes a 14-page PDF called "Guidance on Remote Extraterrestrial Commerce"? Tax always shows up after commerce. First someone sells something. Then the government notices. Then a letter arrives. So yes, the moon is probably safe for now. Earth, unfortunately, is still Earth. We built Numeral for that.

@AmazonHelp We’ve been reaching out but getting stonewalled - how do we escalate?

@SpamRoss Hello! When you have a moment, please reach out to our Seller Support team here so that they could assist you: amzn.to/48o2tgL. -Ahmed

My Amazon seller account is stuck in suspension. Anyone have a POC or route to escalate?

I told someone I don’t use Claude Code to decide whether a banana is ripe. He said that was brave, then asked if I was pre-seed or pre-electricity.

This is both a budget problem and a pretty strong adoption signal. Three months ago, AI wrote a fraction of live updates to Uber’s backend. Now it’s 11% on systems that touch pricing, matching, payments, and driver incentives. Stuff that shouldn’t randomly break because someone got excited about Claude Code. You don’t blow through your annual budget by April on software people are politely testing. Uber’s CTO said he wants AI agents writing, testing, and deploying code, with supervisor agents checking other agents for mistakes. Sounds extreme but you need to remember that most engineering orgs already work in layers: automated systems checking other systems, humans reviewing humans, tests catching regressions before they ship. Finance teams are going to have a hard time modeling this. Usage can go vertical in one quarter, and the line between “tooling cost” and “engineering leverage” is going to get blurry fast.

You can create sales tax exposure by hiring one person. Say you are a remote startup and you hire someone in South Carolina. If your product is taxable there, that one hire can create physical presence and turn South Carolina into a state you now need to care about from a compliance standpoint. That catches founders off guard because the company still feels like it lives on the internet. The team is distributed, the product is online, and nothing about the business feels tied to one place. Then one employee changes the picture and you are dealing with a tax obligation you were not planning for. Revenue thresholds are part of the story, but headcount can get you there too. That is how companies end up with exposure in states they were barely thinking about while making what felt like a completely normal hiring decision. It is an annoying rule but ignoring it does not make it go away. But don’t worry - Numeral’s got your back.