Selling internationally used to mean hiring country managers, tax advisers, and local legal teams before your first transaction even went through. Outpost is changing that. The London-based FinTech acts as a legally liable entity on your behalf, so you can sell into new markets without building out operational infrastructure from scratch.
Founded in 2023 by Will Mahon-Heap, Outpost handles payments, tax compliance, and legal liability for companies selling digital products and services across borders. Mahon-Heap joined Revolut when the company could still fit inside a small London co-working space, launched its first international market in Australia, and then helped roll it out across Brazil, India, and the Philippines. He later served as Chief Business Officer at Wayflyer, the e-commerce financing platform. Across both roles, the same friction kept surfacing: international payments and cross-border tax compliance.
Two Products, One Problem:
Outpost runs two core products. The first is Merchant of Record, where Outpost creates a dedicated local entity in each market where a merchant wants to sell, allowing companies to process payments domestically and optimize merchant category codes without pooling transactions with other merchants. That last part matters. Most MoR providers pool multiple merchants under one entity, which means another merchant’s poor approval history can drag yours down. Outpost keeps each merchant isolated.
The second product is Tax of Record. Outpost becomes liable for your indirect tax, calculates it at checkout, files returns, and handles audits. If they make an error, they pay the fine. That full liability transfer is the core offer here. It means your team stops tracking VAT thresholds across dozens of jurisdictions and redirects that time toward actual business operations.
The Numbers Behind it:
The business case is concrete. Outpost merchants see local payment approval rates rise by 7% on average, without having to hire country managers or local advisers. On the tax side, a global consumer app generating more than $500 million in annual revenue uses Outpost’s Merchant of Record infrastructure to accept payments in markets where it does not have legal entities, reducing processing fees and increasing payment approvals.
Across its customer base, Outpost reports an average revenue increase of $500,000 and processes over $1 billion annually. Those figures come from real customer data, not projections.
Why Now:
Global trade reached record levels in 2025, with UNCTAD projecting it would surpass $35 trillion for the first time. But a shift towards protectionism, driven by rising US tariffs and a broader rewiring of supply chains, has created a more fragmented trading environment. Governments are tightening enforcement and updating tax regimes more frequently, with more than 20,000 indirect tax jurisdictions worldwide now actively revising rates and compliance requirements.
For a startup or a growing SaaS business trying to expand into LATAM or Southeast Asia, keeping up with all of that manually is simply not practical. Outpost’s AI engine is trained on millions of pages of trade regulation and automatically monitors those 20,000+ tax rates, applying the correct tax treatment and customs classification for each transaction.
Backed with Serious Capital:
In March 2026, the Outpost raised $17.5 million in Series A funding led by Ribbit, known for backing companies like Revolut, Coinbase, and Stripe. The round was supported by Better Tomorrow Ventures, which previously led a $3 million seed round less than a year prior. Angel investors include executives from Revolut, Uber, Affirm, Airwallex, and Checkout. The broader team brings hands-on experience from Revolut, Adyen, and Airwallex, which gives the technical depth to match the investor list.
New hires in engineering, compliance, and operations will support merchant onboarding, with the team growth aimed at strengthening the platform’s ability to serve subscription companies and e-commerce brands.
The Setup is Practical:
Outpost is PSP agnostic. It works with Adyen, Stripe, and Checkout.com, and merchants keep their existing processor relationships. No migration is required, and existing reporting and analytics workflows stay in place. You connect Outpost as an additional layer on top of what you already have.
For operators managing global payment infrastructure, that’s the kind of detail that matters. You’re not rebuilding your stack. You’re adding liability coverage and local market access to it. If you want to explore how it works for your business, you can book a demo at outpost.ai.
The analogy Mahon-Heap uses is the rise of platforms like Deel or Remote.com, which allowed companies to hire globally without setting up entities in every country. Outpost is applying that same logic to commerce. Its proprietary AI engine is trained on millions of pages of global trade regulations, and as governments continue updating tax regimes at a pace, that training set only becomes more valuable. For merchants who want to expand internationally without absorbing every compliance risk that comes with it, Outpost is building the infrastructure layer to make that possible.
