Fonoa: The AI Operating System Global Indirect Tax Has Been Waiting For
Fonoa is building an operating system for autonomous tax, and just acquired PwC's Indirect Tax Edge.
Indirect tax – the value-added tax (VAT), sales tax, and goods-and-services tax (GST) that businesses collect and remit on every transaction – is an approximately $4.4 trillion global obligation where the consequences of getting it wrong are severe. But, the software meant to manage that complexity has barely changed in two decades. Legacy incumbents have grown through acquisitions, and often run on-premise architectures that fragment the product experience across geographies and break down under volume pressure.
Compliance requirements have multiplied at the same time. More than 100 countries now mandate real-time e-invoicing and digital reporting. Companies are scaling across borders earlier and faster than ever before. Meanwhile, boards expect tax functions to do more with less - obligations are growing, headcount is not. Every other function is being transformed by AI, while indirect tax has struggled to implement production-ready AI workflows.
The result is a structural mismatch: high-volume, multi-jurisdiction businesses running on tax infrastructure designed for a slower, local era. The category is ripe for reinvention.
In recent years, Fonoa has proven itself to be a global leader in indirect tax for modern enterprises globally. Its modular platform is built on a single data model, designed for the high-volume, real-time needs of some of the world’s largest enterprises including Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Booking.com, Zoom, Dell, Canva, Intuit, Lenovo, among others. The global indirect tax software opportunity alone is approximately $30 billion today. The services market opportunity is several times larger. Both budgets are directly addressable for Fonoa.
Headline is proud to lead Fonoa’s $110 million Series C, joined by new investors Eurazeo and Forestay and alongside existing investors Index Ventures, OMERS, Coatue, and Dawn Capital.
Why Fonoa
Four reasons drove our conviction:
Founders who lived the problem at scale and are driving the industry forward globally. Davor Tremac and Filip Sturman saw the indirect tax problem firsthand at Uber, where Davor was General Manager for Southeast Europe and Filip a Senior Manager. They watched legacy software fail to support Uber’s high volumes of and real-time transactions across 70+ countries. Fonoa is the platform they wished they had. Rob van der Woude - Uber’s former Head of International Tax and a former Uber board member - joined as Chief Tax Officer in Fonoa’s earliest days.
Founded in Zagreb, Fonoa is now a global company with regional hubs in the US, EU, UK, and Australia. It has earned the trust of the world’s largest enterprises and attracted world-class talent across every team. Davor and Filip are true pioneers driving the industry forward on a global scale.
A tax operating system built on modular infrastructure with true data intelligence. Unlike the old way of patching together many point solutions with siloed data, Fonoa’s modules cover tax determination, tax ID validation, e-invoicing, invoicing, returns, and data sharing on a single platform with one audit trail and data model. It supports tax determination across more than 190 jurisdictions, validates tax IDs in over 100 countries, and processes more than a billion transactions annually. The result? A dramatic reduction in manual burden alongside meaningful cost savings and ROI for customers.
A blue-chip customer base, deep customer love, and strong net revenue retention. Fonoa serves leading enterprises across technology, financial services, electronics, manufacturing, retail, transportation, and beyond in every major market. These are companies operating at transaction volumes that overwhelm legacy tax solutions. Many came to Fonoa after multi-year, multi-million-dollar attempts to make incumbent software work or to build a solution internally. Customers report up to 90% faster tax calculation, meaningful accuracy gains, substantial reductions in compliance headcount, lower outsourced services costs, and meaningful vendor consolidation across the stack and various jurisdictions.
A platform purpose-built for autonomous tax. Fonoa is building the operating system for autonomous tax: AI that tracks every rule, acts on every obligation, and proves every decision. Agents monitor obligations, populate returns, catch anomalies, and assemble audit packs in seconds - running on clean, structured, versioned tax data from day one, with no legacy codebase constraining what can be built on top. The system does the work while humans assess and make the calls.
Looking Forward
Alongside the Series C, Fonoa is acquiring Indirect Tax Edge, PwC’s enterprise tax compliance platform used by hundreds of multinational customers to manage VAT and GST reporting, e-filing, transactional data management, and tax analytics. PwC is a world leader in indirect tax services, and this acquisition is a strong endorsement of what the Fonoa team has built.
The Series C and the PwC Edge acquisition mark the start of Fonoa’s next chapter. Fonoa is defining AI indirect tax for global enterprises.