Planned leadership transition positions Avalara to accelerate and scale its AI-driven innovation
DURHAM, N.C., May 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, announced that Hugo Sarrazin has been appointed Chief Executive Officer. Scott McFarlane, Avalara's co-founder and original CEO, will become an advisor to ensure Avalara's ongoing success, effective today.
Sarrazin will lead Avalara's global operations and strategy, focused on scaling the business, strengthening execution, and advancing innovation for customers and partners worldwide. This transition preserves continuity while sharpening Avalara's focus on execution and innovation in its next phase of growth. Sarrazin will also join Avalara's Board of Directors.
"I'm excited to join the leader for tax and compliance that leverages proprietary data and deep domain expertise to deliver intelligent, dynamic solutions for customers worldwide," said Sarrazin. "Avalara is helping define how AI agents can automate and simplify compliance at global scale and already has a leading AI-powered platform and market presence that few companies can replicate. The opportunity now is to accelerate innovation even further, turning that advantage into more seamless outcomes for customers and partners globally."
Sarrazin has more than 30 years of experience building and scaling global software and technology businesses, with a strong track record of execution, innovation, and customer focus. He most recently served as President and CEO of Udemy, where he scaled the business through product-led and inorganic growth, advanced AI-driven innovation, and led the company through its sale to Coursera.
Prior to Udemy, Sarrazin was President and Chief Product and Technology Officer at UKG, where he led cloud transformation initiatives, expanded AI-driven solutions, and drove strategic acquisitions. He spent 26 years at McKinsey & Company, advising global organizations on digital transformation and M&A, and co-founded McKinsey Digital Labs.
McFarlane co-founded Avalara in 2004 and has led the company for more than two decades, growing it from a startup on Bainbridge Island, Washington, into the global leader in tax and compliance, supporting more than 1 million businesses worldwide. Under his leadership, Avalara pioneered cloud-based compliance, completed its 2018 initial public offering, and scaled into a global platform with more than $1.3 billion in annual revenue, an ecosystem of more than 1,400 integrations, and deep partnerships across ERP, ecommerce, and financial systems, while helping guide Avalara's evolution into an AI-first platform for tax and compliance.
"Avalara is stronger today than at any point in our history," said McFarlane. "We've built a category leader with real scale and a platform that's becoming more critical as tax and compliance grow more complex. The next chapter is about moving faster and delivering more for our customers and partners. Hugo brings the operational and technology leadership needed to accelerate what comes next."
Advancing AI in Tax and Compliance
Avalara continues to lead the evolution of tax and compliance through AI-driven innovation. Building on more than two decades of investment in tax content, regulatory coverage, and integrations, Avalara's platform processes tens of billions of transactions annually, helping businesses operate with greater accuracy and efficiency in an increasingly complex global environment. Through innovations such as Agentic Tax and Compliance and the Avalara LLM framework for agentic applications, Avalara is embedding AI directly into the compliance lifecycle-automating processes and enabling more consistent, real-time outcomes for customers.
About Avalara
Avalara is the agentic AI platform for global tax and compliance. For more than two decades, Avalara has built one of the most expansive libraries of tax content and integrations in the industry, processing more than 54 billion transactions annually and supporting millions of businesses worldwide. The company's purpose-built AI agents automate end-to-end compliance with greater precision, from tax calculations and return filings to exemption certificate management and beyond. For more information, visit Avalara.com.
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