This issue is proudly bought to you by Kintsugi
Kintsugi automates sales tax compliance for SaaS and ecommerce businesses. A data platform at its core, Kintsugi integrates seamlessly with billing, accounting, HR, and ecommerce systems to calculate taxes across borders, monitor exposure in real-time, handle registrations and filings across local, state and country jurisdictions, and manage remittance with audit-ready reporting.
Kintsugi operates across 110 countries, with fast setup, transparent pricing, 24/7 support, and a free entry point — a deliberate departure from the implementation-heavy, contract-first model that has defined this category.
Over 7,000 businesses have connected their data to Kintsugi to put sales tax on autopilot. Based in San Francisco, founded in 2022.
Main site and product overview: Kintsugi – AI‑powered sales tax automation
Customer reviews: Kintsugi Reviews, Details & Ratings on G2
Connect with Kintsugi
Get the latest on Kintsugi’s product and expansion releases, events, and partnerships, and see our take on the latest in tax tech by following us on LinkedIn
Turn on real-time exposure monitoring to uncover where your sales tax liabilities are
Calculate how much sales tax you need to charge or pay based on the item’s price and your location
🎉 First Partnership For The Nexus
Today’s issue marks a really important step in the journey for the Nexus, the first corporate collaboration. In my mind, this is an amazing thing for 2 main reasons:
It’s such a natural progression from online, uni-directional research to actual conversations, this lends colour and substance to the work I’ve been doing
I get to learn and share different and exciting perspectives on the market, from the intelligent and driven people - like Pujun Bhatnager - that are shaping it
It’s also a lot of fun!
When I think about this it was inevitable really but I’m pleased it’s happened so soon, and I can’t wait to share the first one with you, so here you go…
✌ Paul
P.S. I’m still including the usual jobs, training and event links below….
P.P.S. Interested in partnering?
The Nexus × Kintsugi: A Conversation with Pujun Bhatnagar
CEO & Co-Founder, Kintsugi
Paul Guyer: Pujun, let’s start at the beginning. You’ve got quite an unusual origin story for a tech founder. How did you end up here, and why found Kintsugi?
Pujun Bhatnagar: My relationship with tax goes back further than most. My grandfather was a chartered accountant, what we’d call a CPA in the US. My father followed the same path and was an early employee at Avalara, where he spent over thirteen years. My mom is an economist. So our dinner table conversations were essentially about how society functions, how infrastructure gets funded, and how the world raises the money to build roads, libraries, schools.
When my father started sharing the realities of what Avalara’s product was doing well — and where it was falling short — the idea started forming. I want to be clear: any business that gets customers to pay a single dollar is doing something genuinely hard. I have real respect for what Scott MacFarlane and that team built.
But the question I kept coming back to was: what if you approached indirect taxation not as a tax content problem, but as a data problem?
My entire career had been built in data, statistics, and AI. What people now call deep learning and LLMs, though I was doing that research in my freshman year. I wrote two papers, one on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, one on Collaborative Machine Learning, that were eventually acquired by Microsoft Research and became foundational to ChatGPT. After that, I spent five-plus years at Facebook, watching how the world’s biggest companies attack problems from a data-first perspective.
Then in 2018, South Dakota v. Wayfair happened. My father and I talked about what it meant: if this ruling goes in favor of South Dakota, sales tax becomes a data-intensive problem at a scale the industry has never seen before. And I could already see that the AI and research capabilities underpinning the traditional tax content engine were going to become commoditized. Fast.
So the question became: what if we built a data platform company — not a sales tax company — and used that as the foundation for compliance rails covering indirect taxation globally?
"By the time South Dakota v. Wayfair happened in 2018, it felt less like a legal event and more like a starting gun."
Paul Guyer: That framing — data platform, not tax software — comes up a lot when I look Kintsugi online. How does that manifest in practice?
Pujun Bhatnagar: It starts with setup. In just a few clicks and minutes, a business can connect their revenue and HR data and we show them their full sales tax exposure, free, no credit card required. We call it a Nexus report or study, and it updates every ten minutes to monitor their exposure in real time.
From there, the platform handles end-to-end compliance: registrations, filings, remittances, exemption certificates, tax calculation APIs, across 110 countries. Not just the content layer. The actual work.
The agents we’ve built do the heavy lifting in parallel: product classification, address validation, nexus determination, exposure analysis. Things that used to require teams of people manually working pivot tables or running spreadsheets with twenty-five million rows until their laptops overheated. We automated all of it.
My co-founder Jeff Gibson, is our CTO, and he comes from a background in quote-to-cash architecture. He helped Postly, Cloudflare, and Lacework prepare for their IPOs. When I pitched him this idea as a slide deck, he immediately saw how to build the systems layer. Together we asked: if we have the data, and we have the technical chops, what can we solve for?
Paul Guyer: One thing that stands out in your reviews and customer feedback is onboarding. Vendors in this space have made that notoriously painful.
Pujun Bhatnagar: It was a deliberate architectural choice. We built for product-led growth from day one — a true “get started” button, not just a temporary free trial offering. A customer can follow our docs, connect their data, and see live exposure analysis without speaking to a salesperson or onboarding team.
Paul Guyer: Let me push on AI for a moment. There’s a lot of signal and a lot of noise in this space right now. How do you separate out the signals?
Pujun Bhatnagar: Healthy skepticism is warranted. A lot of what gets called “AI” is rebranded statistics from a decade ago.
What I can tell you is how we think about it. Other incumbents, from what I can observe externally, have historically hired hundreds of researchers to maintain their tax content engine manually. At Kintsugi, which is less than three years old, we built a comparable capability using in-house tools and three tax researchers to start. That’s what genuine AI leverage looks like in practice.
“If we are doing things the same way we did them last quarter, we are already legacy.”
The same applies to integrations. We can ship a connector to an ERP or billing platform in under a week if we have the right permissions. I don’t see that velocity anywhere else in this market.
I also lecture at Stanford, which keeps me closely connected to what’s actually at the frontier. One thing Jeff and I challenge ourselves on constantly: if we’re doing things the same way we did last quarter, we’re already legacy. The cycle has accelerated that much.
Paul Guyer: We’ve seen a broader tension in the market lately between human capital and AI spend — Intuit recently cut around 17% of their workforce. How does that play out for customers and the people left in these organizations?
Pujun Bhatnagar: I see AI completely differently than a cost-cutting mechanism. The question Jeff and I ask is: if our R&D team was producing X amount of output before AI, we want that to be 5X, not the same X at lower cost. Give the best people the best tools, built in-house where necessary, and let them operate at a different scale entirely. That’s how you move faster than everyone else and corner the market.
For customer-facing functions, go-to-market, customer success, the calculus is different. Customers are trusting us with sensitive financial data. They expect the platform to work, and they want a human to answer when something’s unclear. We take every support theme seriously, and when a pattern emerges, we build the automation to address the root cause rather than patching it with headcount.
I took a page from Facebook’s early culture on this: if you’re doing something manually more than once, you need to automate it. That’s a genuine organizational posture, not a hiring freeze dressed up as innovation. There’s a real difference between companies that use AI to do more with great people and companies that use AI as a justification to do less for their customers.
Paul Guyer: You’re at over 7,000 customers now. That’s an extraordinary number for a three-year-old company. What do you think that says about the market?
Pujun Bhatnagar: It signals that the market was ready for a different model. The incumbents did important work. They created the market, made compliance accessible, and built real content depth. But they took a fundamentally consulting-led approach. For years, the pitch was: we have the most nuanced tax engine, we have the most researchers, we support the most product categories. That was a legitimate moat until AI commoditized the content layer.
Now customers are sophisticated enough to ask for something different: one neck to choke. They don’t want to buy a content engine from one vendor and hire a team to handle filings and remittance manually. They want a single platform doing the whole circle of compliance.
"We are building the compliance rails. We do not want the work, the client relationships, or the advisory revenue. Think of what we're doing as laying the railway tracks. What you build on top — that's yours."
We also happen to be in a period of structural market expansion. Post-Wayfair, compliance became every company’s problem, not just large enterprises. COVID accelerated that by dispersing workforces across jurisdictions. AI-first and digital-first companies are hitting nexus in multiple states almost immediately after launch. And nearly half of US states have meaningfully updated their sales tax treatment of SaaS in the last two years, with more expected in 2026 given budget pressures.
Paul Guyer: How do you think about the TAM in that context?
Pujun Bhatnagar: Differently from the traditional framing. The conventional estimate has been somewhere around $7–14 billion globally for sales tax automation. When I look at this as an indirect taxation data problem serving three constituencies–businesses, expert firms like CPAs and accounting practices, and government agencies—I see something closer to $7 trillion. Consumption tax is quietly becoming the primary revenue mechanism for local and state governments around the world. It’s the one lever that scales, that’s politically viable, and that data makes increasingly traceable and enforceable.
Paul Guyer: On the expert side with tax and accounting firms, you’ve been quite deliberate about positioning Kintsugi as complementary rather than competitive. How is that different to other vendors?
Pujun Bhatnagar: Some platforms in this space historically wanted to eventually own the customer relationship end-to-end, including consulting. That’s not us.
Think of Kintsugi as laying the railway tracks. It’s the job of the CPA firm, the accounting practice, the SALT specialist, to build the trains; the premium experiences, the nuanced advisory work, the relationship. What we give them is the infrastructure that makes all of that faster and more accurate.
There was a recent case in North Carolina where a business sued their CPA firm for failing to identify a two-million-dollar sales tax liability even though the firm had explicitly stated they didn’t cover SALT. Customer expectations are evolving fast. Experts need tools that make them look current and capable without having to rebuild their practice from scratch. That’s what we’re building for them.
And because Kintsugi can run headless, integrating silently into an accounting firm’s own systems, they can wrap it into their billable practice without the client even seeing the underlying tool.
"When Facebook moved to the former Sun Microsystems campus, they kept the Sun sign on the reverse side of the building — so employees looking out could see it as a reminder of what happens when you stop transforming."
Paul Guyer: Who owns the future of AI in tax tech?
Pujun Bhatnagar: I always go back to first principles. Whoever is genuinely asking every day whether they’re at the bleeding edge of what the best people in AI are doing.
There’s a story I love about Facebook’s move from University Avenue in Palo Alto to the old Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park. They kept the Sun Microsystems sign on the inside of the building so that every employee, looking outward, would see the ghost of the company that didn’t transform fast enough. That choice was intentional.
I’m not saying legacy providers disappear. There’s real work to be done across the market. But I do believe that the companies that will own this future are the ones treating innovation as an existential daily discipline, not a quarterly initiative.
Paul Guyer: What’s your prediction for how this space evolves over the next few years?
Pujun Bhatnagar: Three things. First, the content and connector layer will continue to commoditize and accelerate. We’re building integrations in weeks. That timeline will compress further.
Second, e-invoicing. Sixty-plus countries are already mandating electronic invoicing with real-time or near-real-time reporting requirements. This is happening in Europe now; it’s coming to the US. Governments want observability into every transaction, that’s the real driver. Once they have that visibility, real-time tax calculation is the next logical step.
Third, zoom out. Governments globally are under structural fiscal pressure. They can’t raise income tax without triggering mobility, remote work proved that. They can’t raise property taxes without creating a cash-poor equity-rich crisis for homeowners. Consumption tax is the remaining lever: it taxes participation in an economy, not residency. You can tax tourists, remote sellers, digital transactions. States like New York, Florida, and Massachusetts have already hired data scientists specifically to cross-reference payroll data against filing activity. This is proactive enforcement at scale. The compliance burden isn’t going to lighten, it’s going to get more precise and more automated, simultaneously.
"You can't keep raising income tax — people relocate. You can't aggressively raise property taxes — your local representatives get voted out. Consumption taxation is the linchpin. If you're participating in a society's infrastructure, you pay your share."
Paul Guyer: Last question. What’s your practical guidance for the people reading this, whether they’re running a business, working in tax, or building in this space?
Pujun Bhatnagar: For growing businesses: indirect taxation is the number one area where you take a valuation haircut at exit, and the number one unpleasant surprise during due diligence. At minimum, connect your data and understand your exposure. Then you can prioritize getting compliant relative to everything else on your plate. You can’t manage what you don’t see.
For tax professionals and CPAs: we are building the compliance rails. We have no interest in your client relationships, your advisory work, or your consulting revenue. Use our system as infrastructure. The fact that there’s still almost no SALT curriculum in CPA certification programs in 2025, post-Wayfair, is a gap waiting to be closed. The tools now exist to fill it.
Paul Guyer: Pujun thank you, I loved our conversation. The way you’ve approached this from a data platform perspective, your family background and the AI research history, it’s a unique vantage point and it shows in what you’ve built.
Pujun Bhatnagar: Thank you, Paul. Death and taxes — you can’t avoid them.
Kintsugi provides automated sales tax and VAT compliance for ecommerce and SaaS businesses globally. Learn more at trykintsugi.com.
The Nexus is a short, curated weekly briefing covering what actually matters across the tax tech ecosystem—market insights, career opportunities and professional development. Subscribe here:
Want an intro to Kintsugi?
A selection of of opportunities to connect in person and interact online over the next few weeks
Connect with Kintsugi
Latino Tax Fest - (In-Person) stop by Kintsugi’s booth (#206)
Kintsugi | June 22-25 | MGM GRAND HOTEL & CASINO - LAS VEGAS, NV
Join Kintsugi amongst others for a variety of activities including tax education, networking and growth
https://latinotaxfest.com/
F Suite AI Demo Day - (Webinar)
Kintsugi | June 23, 2026 1:00pm-3:00pm EDT | Online/Virtual
Join The F Suite for this high-energy virtual event, where you’ll get a rapid-fire look at powerful tools designed to streamline your business without the hassle of long sales calls or drawn-out research cycles.
https://fsuitedemoday623.splashthat.com/
June 2026
**ITR Indirect Tax Forum 2026 (Conference)**
**International Tax Review** | 23–24 June 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands
ITR’s flagship indirect tax conference bringing together senior in-house indirect tax professionals and industry experts for two days of curated discussion on VAT, e-invoicing, and digital transformation. Vertex and Fintua among sponsors.
[Register →](https://registration.crowdcomms.com/itrindtax)
Tax & Legal Tech Summit (In-Person)
KPMG | June 25, 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland Summit focused on AI, analytics, and automation transforming tax and legal functions.
Event Page → https://kpmg.com/ch/en/events/2026/06/tax-legal-tech-summit.html
Latino Tax Fest - (In-Person) stop by Kintsugi’s booth (#206)
Kintsugi | June 22-25 | MGM GRAND HOTEL & CASINO - LAS VEGAS, NV
Join Kintsugi for a session including tax education, netowrking and growth
https://latinotaxfest.com/
F Suite AI Demo Day - (Webinar)
Kintsugi | June 23, 2026 1:00pm-3:00pm EDT | Online/Virtual
Join The F Suite for this high-energy virtual event, where you’ll get a rapid-fire look at powerful tools designed to streamline your business without the hassle of long sales calls or drawn-out research cycles.
https://fsuitedemoday623.splashthat.com/
**The Future of Tax Is Tech-Savvy (Webinar)**
**insightsoftware / KPMG** | 25 June 2026, 14:00 BST / 09:00 EST | Online/Virtual
Featuring KPMG’s Global Tax Transformation Leader alongside insightsoftware, this webinar examines how the corporate tax role is being redefined by technology — and how the right platform choices make the difference between keeping up and leading.
[Register →](https://insightsoftware.com/resources/the-future-of-tax-is-tech-savvy/)
July 2026
Global Withholding Tax Summit 2026 (In-Person)
Withholding Tax Summit | July 1, 2026 | London, UK Conference dedicated to withholding tax and cross-border compliance challenges, with emphasis on regulatory change and digitalisation.
Event Page → https://withholdingtaxsummit.com/
*any organisers or events I’ve missed? please let me know.
A curated selection of blogs, white-papers and on demand content published by multiple organisartions across the landscape, organised into a themed learning path.
MONTH ONE · JUNE 2026
Landscape, AI Strategy & the New Shape of the Tax Tech Market
This month maps the terrain: where the tax technology market is in mid-2026, how AI has moved from experimentation to deployment, what the data tells us about how tax teams are actually investing, and what differentiated strategies look like across the full spectrum from enterprise platforms to AI-native SMB tools.
Week 1 · 1–5 June
The State of the Market: What the Data Actually Says
We open with two benchmark research pieces that together paint the most accurate picture available of where corporate tax technology investment, adoption, and sentiment stands in mid-2026 — the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report (built on 170 US tax decision-makers surveyed Nov–Dec 2025, in partnership with TEI) and Vertex’s Indirect Tax Trends report, which covers the regulatory and policy shifts driving the spending. KPMG’s freshly published connected modelling framework provides the advisory firm’s strategic synthesis.
01 📖 6 Insights from the 2026 Corporate Tax Technology Report Thomson Reuters Institute / TEI 10–12 min
02 📖 2026 Indirect Tax Trends Vertex Inc. 8–10 min
03 📖 The Future of Tax: Connected Modeling and an AI-Enabled Tax Function KPMG 8–10 min
Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min
Week 2 · 8–12 June
AI in Practice: From Bolt-On Tools to Agentic Workflows
A deliberately varied week — Wolters Kluwer on the organisational transformation challenges of AI adoption (not just the technology), Thomson Reuters on how indirect tax teams are building agility into their function, and Sphere’s independent overview of the AI tools landscape for tax professionals. Together these avoid the vendor echo chamber and give a rounded view of where AI is genuinely landing versus where it is still aspirational.
04 📖 Survive or Thrive? 2026 Will Test Tax Teams’ Limits Wolters Kluwer / CCH 6–8 min
05 📖 Indirect Tax Transformation: Navigating Change, Embracing Technology Thomson Reuters 10–12 min
07 📖 AI Tools for Tax Professionals: Automate Smarter, Not Harder Sphere 10–12 min
Week total: 3 articles · ~26–32 min
Week 3 · 15–19 June
The New Vendor Landscape: Enterprise to AI-Native, and Everything Between
This is the week where the expanded vendor universe comes into focus. Kintsugi’s 2026 SaaS guide is an unusually candid market map — covering the full spectrum from Avalara and Vertex at the enterprise end through to Anrok, Numeral, and Kintsugi itself for SMBs and SaaS companies, with honest commentary on where each fits and fails. Fonoa’s tech stack strategy piece provides the architectural counterpoint: how do you build a coherent compliance infrastructure rather than accumulating point solutions? The webinar from Wolters Kluwer closes the week with a live practitioner lens on the transformation challenge.
06📖Best Sales Tax Software for SaaS Companies: 2026 Guide Kintsugi 12–15 min
10📖Tax Tech Strategy: Integrate Technology for Compliance Fonoa 10–12 min
09🎥Beyond the Return: How AI and Automation Are Reshaping Tax Preparation Wolters Kluwer / CCH 50–60 min
Week total: 2 articles + 1 webinar · ~72–87 min
Week 4 · 22–26 June
The Strategic Lens: From Compliance Tool to Business Partner
Month One closes with two pieces that zoom out to the strategic and organisational challenge — Wolters Kluwer on the shift from compliance to advisory services, and Fonoa’s SYNAPSE 2026 practitioner takeaways on what the tax function looks like when real-time compliance is the baseline. The Vertex / Kintsugi investment announcement is included as a signal piece: what does it mean when the largest indirect tax enterprise vendor makes a strategic bet on an AI-native SMB platform?
08📖Beyond Compliance: How Tax Professionals Are Becoming Strategic Advisors Wolters Kluwer / CCH 8–10 min
11📖5 Key Indirect Tax Trends from SYNAPSE 2026 Fonoa 10–12 min
36📖Vertex Announces Strategic Investment in Kintsugi: What It Means for the Market Vertex / Kintsugi 6–8 min
Week total: 3 articles · ~24–30 min
Month One total: 9 articles + 1 webinar · ~148–181 min
*any cool content I’ve missed? please let me know.
A selection of open roles across tax tech vendors and tax advisory/consulting businesses who are involved in tax technology.
Use the column headers to sort, or the (new) search function and don’t forget to navigate all pages!
*I do this using an AI agent and due to the volume, I don’t check every link, so please let me know if any of these don’t work or have disappeared when you follow them.
✌ Last thoughts
Thanks again for reading! If you have any feedback, suggestions, want to contribute, share gossip or would like to work together in any way, email me here or hit the button below!
