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Cross-border commerce has never been larger — but for companies trying to sell internationally, it has rarely been more complicated.
Global trade surpassed $35 trillion in 2025, according to projections from UNCTAD. Yet the geopolitical and regulatory landscape underpinning that growth has become increasingly fragmented. Under Trump, tariffs have re-appeared in global trade, meaning supply chains are being re-engineered. Meanwhile, governments are updating tax regimes more frequently.
For businesses trying to sell globally, that means navigating a maze of more than 20,000 indirect tax jurisdictions, shifting customs rules, and a fragmented payment infrastructure. A product priced correctly one month may require a different tax treatment the next. A shipment that once passed customs smoothly may suddenly face new duties.
Into that environment steps London-based Outpost, which has announced a $17.5 million Series A funding round led by Ribbit, the Palo Alto, California-based fintech investor known for backing companies such as Revolut, Coinbase, and Stripe.
The round also includes existing investor Better Tomorrow Ventures, which led Outpost’s $3 million seed round less than a year ago, alongside angel investors including executives from Revolut, Uber, Affirm, Airwallex, and Checkout.
Founded in 2024, Outpost is attempting to solve one of the most persistent operational challenges facing global digital businesses: how to sell across borders without building an expensive patchwork of legal entities, payment systems, and compliance teams in every market.
Its solution is what the company calls “zero liability infrastructure.”
Businesses selling internationally must deal with VAT in Europe, sales tax in the US, and GST in many other markets, each with its own rules and filing requirements.
“There’s over 18,000 tax jurisdictions around the world,” Outpost founder and CEO Will Mahon-Heap told Pathfounders.
“Companies either hire consultants, lawyers, and accountants to determine what those rates are. Then they have to register, file, and remit taxes to authorities around the world.” The result is a compliance burden that can quickly overwhelm smaller companies trying to expand internationally.
“Merchants are forced to choose between spending millions on consultants and local entity setup,” Mahon-Heap says, “or carrying enormous risk on payments and compliance.”
This is where “zero liability infrastructure” comes in says Mahon-Heap. He says Outpost’s approach is to absorb that complexity on behalf of the merchant.
At the centre of the platform is a proprietary AI system trained on millions of pages of global trade regulations. The system monitors tax changes across jurisdictions, automatically applying the correct tax treatment and customs classification to each transaction.
Instead of businesses needing to register tax entities around the world (and just as Deel does with employees) Outpost becomes the legally liable entity handling payments, tax filings, and regulatory compliance.
“We monitor regulatory changes in real time and do all of the compliance in-house,” Mahon-Heap explains. “Then that means that you don't have to worry about filing your taxes or registering around the world because we have a network of companies, and this network of companies is registered with all of the relevant tax authorities in each jurisdiction.”
The company offers two core products. Outpost acts as the ‘Merchant of Record’, creating dedicated local entities for merchants in each market they sell into, enabling local payment processing and regulatory coverage. Secondondly they cover ‘Tax of Record’, becoming legally liable for VAT, GST, and sales tax globally, absorbing audit risk and penalties.
Because payments are processed locally rather than cross-border, the company says merchants typically see 10% higher payment approval rates, along with lower processing costs.
Mahon-Heap argues that the company’s timing is tied to a broader structural shift in global trade. Working at Revolut and similar cross-border businesses, he’s “been thinking about this problem for over a decade,” he says.
“But the timing is the most important thing… the polycrisis, as they call it in the media, which is the trade war and the tariff war that's currently going on. But this is combined at a very opportune moment with AI. Where you can get all of these rules… put them into a database, [and] make them queryable, and we can actually surface them in an API. So you can sell globally very effectively.”
Mahon-Heap’s perspective comes from experience scaling global fintech infrastructure.
He joined Revolut when the company could still fit inside a small London co-working space and stayed through its rapid international expansion.
He launched Revolut’s first international market, Australia, and then helped roll it out across markets like Brazil, India and the Philippines. By the time he left, Revolut had grown to more than 3,000 employees globally.
He later served as Chief Business Officer at Wayflyer, the e-commerce financing platform that has lent more than $1 billion to online merchants. Across both roles, he says, the same problem kept emerging.
“All of our customers complained about two big things: how to take international payments efficiently, and how to deal with regulatory and tax compliance around the world.” He thinks Outpost has the potential to become the infrastructure layer that solves both problems.
The company says it has now expanded into 58 markets in roughly 18 months, launching a new country approximately every six weeks. It currently operates from hubs in London, Amsterdam, and New York, with the Amsterdam team focusing on compliance infrastructure, an area where the Netherlands has become a European centre of expertise.
Outpost is emerging within a broader wave of startups trying to simplify global commerce. In this space: London-based Sokin raised €42.9 million; Yonda Tax secured €12 million. In Sweden, Polar raised €8.6 million; Finland’s eBrands secured €7.5 million.
Mahon-Heap believes the opportunity is still largely a greenfield: “We haven’t actually come up head-to-head with a competitor in a deal,” he says.
“A lot of the opportunity is still wide open because companies everywhere are trying to figure out how to sell internationally.”
The analogy Mahon-Heap uses is the rise of platforms like the aforementioned Deel or Remote.com, which allowed companies to hire globally without setting up entities in every country.
In a world where global trade is expanding even as borders grow more complicated, it may be that this AI-driven phase of digital commerce has arrived just in time.