Eurora opens an Innovation & Research Center to future-proof its platform

The Innovation & Research Center was officially opened on Friday 23rd September 2022 by Eurora’s founder and Global CEO Marko Lastik, together with Walter Trezek, Egon Veermäe, Kaie Hansson and Anneli Aljas. On this occasion, we had the great honor to receive Urmas Klaas, Mayor of Tartu, and Kristjan Järvan, Estonia’s Minister of Entrepreneurship and Information Technology. 

Currently, 30 data and machine-learning scientists are working at the Centre, and the company plans to increase the headcount to 60 scientists. Want to join our science team and play a key role in building Eurora’s future? Check out our open positions! 

Why open an Innovation and Research Centre?

Innovation and scientific research have always been at the core of Eurora. 100+ experts, scientists, analysts, and researchers built our services on AI technology and developed a compliance platform with the highest level of accuracy, speed, and automation available on the market. Opening an Innovation and Research Centre to bring new products and services to the international market is therefore a logical continuation. The Centre is focused on AI/ML research as well as the ongoing development of the platform, both to expand its functionality and to future-proof it by ensuring it can be quickly adapted to legislative changes to international trade. 

The need to future-proof our platform is highlighted by the European Commission’s plans to introduce new legislation. The commission plans to add product safety and transport security compliance requirements to cross-border trade. This means that cross-border actors will have to prove that particular goods meet all the requirements before they are allowed to even leave the warehouse.

Yet, many companies are already struggling to comply with the current regulations. The increasing pressure on compliance will therefore be especially challenging for companies under-investing in their technology. By contrast Eurora’s platform already verifies the accuracy of parcel data, and its functionality can easily be extended to verify compliance with transport security or product safety. 

Kaie Hansson, the Head of Eurora’s Innovation and Research Centre, gave more details on what the research will focus on. “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, descriptions, punctuation marks, symbols’ occurrence and the position of words in the description of the goods. All this requires the machine to make thousands of decisions to classify the goods accurately and to calculate the correct taxes due based on the destination country.” 

Innovation and Research Centre: the next step in our growth strategy

The opening of the Centre follows a successful US$40 million Series A funding round earlier this year and aligns with Eurora’s growth strategy. In recent months, we 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; e-commerce heavyweight Walter Trezek joined Eurora as the Non-Executive Chairman of the Supervisory Board. In October, we also plan to open an Engineering Hub in Dubai. 

Marko Lastik, Eurora’s founder and Global CEO, commented on the Centre: “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. In order 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 future-proof our operations, we plan to continue investing in research and development by doubling the number of scientists at the Centre to 60.” 

About Eurora’s platform

Eurora’s B2B platform can be used by online sellers, marketplaces, logistics and postal companies, as well as customs authorities. It assigns e-commerce products an appropriate HS code, calculates the applicable duty and tax amounts, and automatically creates electronic declarations for EU duties and taxes. All to help any actors involved in the global supply chain move parcels faster, with lower resource costs, and be more competitive.  

Using AI and ML, Eurora automatically processes 5,000 HS code requests per second with up to 98.5% accuracy, the highest level of accuracy, speed, and automation available on the market. It operates at a fraction of the time and price of hybrid or manual code allocation solutions commonly used today. In addition, Eurora was the first official VAT Intermediary and the first company to issue an IOSS number. 

Our experienced Data Science team keeps improving Eurora’s AI engine daily, as Siimo Jaanus, Data Scientist at Eurora, shared with us. “Being a Data Scientist also involves innovation and research. We have a lot of interesting ideas to improve Eurora’s AI engine. New customers come and use our services every day, so we can gather useful insights to improve the system.”