Eurora Solutions, a provider of an AI-backed cross-border trade compliance platform, has opened a research and development center in Tartu, Estonia.
The Innovation and Research Centre is focused on AI/machine learning research as well as the ongoing development of the platform, both to expand its functionality and to ensure it can be quickly adapted to future legislative changes to international trade.
Currently, 30 data scientists and machine-learning engineers are working at the center, and Eurora plans to increase the headcount to 60 experts.
The need to ‘futureproof’ the platform is highlighted by the European Commission’s plans to introduce new legislation to add product safety and transport security compliance requirements to cross-border trade. Any specific requirements will have to be proven to have been met before particular goods or products containing certain components are allowed to even leave the warehouse. According to Eurora, many companies are already struggling to comply with the current regulations.
The Eurora platform already verifies the accuracy of parcel data, and its functionality can easily be extended to verify compliance with transport security or product safety.
As similar legislative changes will also be introduced in Singapore in 2023, Eurora is set to open a new office in the country later this month to assist e-commerce companies in the region to comply with the increasingly complex regulatory requirements.
Marko Lastik, the founder and group CEO of Eurora, said, “The Innovation and Research Centre forms a key part of our growth strategy. Processing large volumes of data is a core requirement in international trade. To efficiently automate cross-border e-commerce duties and tax declarations, the implementation of data science and machine learning is needed. Eurora’s technology is already used to send more than one billion postal parcels a year. This puts us up to three years ahead of our peers. To stay ahead of the competition and so futureproof our operations, we plan to continue investing in research and development by doubling the number of scientists at the center to 60.”
Using AI and machine learning, Eurora’s B2B compliance platform automatically processes 5,000 requests per second with up to 98% accuracy. The company’s AI uses over 500 million records of training data from real transactions of the world’s largest logistics service providers. The platform can be used by online sellers, marketplaces, logistics and postal companies to automate tax and duty declarations and assign the appropriate HS code. It operates at a fraction of the time and price of hybrid or manual code allocation solutions commonly used today.
Kaie Hansson, the head of Eurora’s Innovation and Research Centre, said, “We work daily to bring new products and services to the international market. One of the research areas will be the application of new language groups. For example, Chinese, French or Spanish have different syntaxes of languages, conventions of descriptions, use of punctuation marks, presence of symbols and position of important words in the description. All this requires the machine to make thousands of decisions to classify the goods accurately and calculate the correct taxes based on the destination country.”
The opening of the new center follows a successful US$40m Series A funding round earlier this year and aligns with the company’s growth strategy. In recent months, Eurora has opened a UK central office in London and a US central office in Miami, in addition to a series of high-level appointments. Chris Lentjes, a Pitney Bowes and DHL veteran with more than 20+ years of industry experience, became Eurora’s US CEO; and e-commerce heavyweight Walter Trezek joined Eurora as the non-executive chairman of the supervisory board. Eurora also plans to open an engineering hub in Dubai later this month.
