Aasim Sani

I'm

I'm the founding engineer at Taxwire, where we automate global sales tax compliance, saving finance teams time and money.

Before this I co-founded Orai (Techstars '18, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education), an AI public speaking coach that scaled to 1M+ users. I also co-founded CopyCat, a generative-AI Figma → React.js compiler that cut front-end build time by 80% for 20k+ developers. (OnDeck 14, VC-backed.)

Outside work: ex-pro cyclist, certified mountaineer. I read a lot (Goodreads).

I'm the founding engineer at Taxwire, where we automate global sales tax compliance, saving finance teams time and money.

Outside work: ex-pro cyclist, certified mountaineer. I read a lot (Goodreads).

Resume Email

Zone 1

Experience

Taxwire

Jan 2024 - present

Founding Engineer (1st employee)

Global sales tax, automated.

After seven years in AI I wanted to build systems where speed and correctness both matter. Sales tax compliance needs both, because every transaction has to compute fast and every return has to be right.

I joined as the first engineer and built the systems that run global sales tax inside finance and commerce stacks. Compute: a real-time tax calculation API in FastAPI that returns the exact tax on every transaction, plus the global nexus engine, the US sales tax engine, and a multi-currency exchange layer. Ingestion: Temporal pipelines that bring in 100M+ transactions a month from Stripe, QuickBooks, Shopify, Business Central, Odoo, Maxio, Measure, and Rillet, with webhooks, historical backfill, and a reconciliation system that catches drift. Ops: a Temporal-driven backfill orchestrator, an RWX-based CI/CD pipeline, and an internal Slack /deploy bot. Python, FastAPI, DuckDB, PostgreSQL, Temporal.

I also ran integration support for our first 200 customers, and I built a certification program for customers' own API integrations.

CopyCat

Jan 2021 - Jan 2024

Co-founder & Chief AI Officer

Figma to React in 30 seconds.

At Orai, the handoff between designers and developers kept breaking our front-end pipeline. CopyCat fixed it with a generative-AI compiler that turned Figma designs into React code. It cut front-end build time by 80% and reached 20,000+ developers. Backed by OnDeck (ODF14) and venture investors.

Orai, Inc.

Nov 2016 - Dec 2020

Intern → Product Manager → Co-founder

An AI speech coach for the other 95% who can't afford a human one.

My co-founders and I started Orai because of our experiences as ESL students in the United States. When we came to Drexel, we could speak English fluently, yet we weren't expressive and confident enough, and because of this, we were limited both personally and professionally. We lost friends, internships, and jobs to this problem.

We tried books, online courses, Toastmasters, and finally a speech coach who offered to coach us for free. When we found out a speech coach can charge close to $5,000 for that one-hour session, we built an app that did the same job at a tiny fraction of the cost. Orai scaled to 1M+ users and was adopted by Comcast, IBM, Nike, and HPE. We raised $2.3M from Comcast Ventures, Menlo VC, and BDMI Ventures.

Zone 2

Awards and Involvements

Forbes 30 Under 30: Education (2021)

Named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education for Orai.

Techstars x Comcast LIFT Labs (2018)

Techstars Comcast LIFT Labs accelerator. Inaugural cohort, 2018.

ODF14: OnDeck Founders (2022)

OnDeck Founders, class of ODF14 (2022).

Full Stack Deep Learning Best Projects (Spring 2021)

Top 10 of 271 projects, Full Stack Deep Learning x Berkeley, Spring 2021.

Mass Challenge

Mass Challenge accelerator, 2017 cohort. Boston.

Creative Destruction Labs

Finalist, Creative Destruction Lab Toronto, 2018 (with Orai).

Hack Princeton (Fall 2018)

Hack Princeton, Fall 2018. Best Use of Google Cloud Platform.

Zone 3

Education

Georgia Tech

I'm pursuing my M.S. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech with a specialization in Computing Systems: partly to formalize my CS background, partly to challenge myself with something genuinely hard.

Drexel University

I studied Entrepreneurship and Computer Science with minors in Marketing and Health Innovations on a 60% scholarship at Drexel. I was part of the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship, the world's only dedicated college of entrepreneurship, ranked #16 globally by the Princeton Review and #2 in the mid-Atlantic region. It was the right kind of intense: Orai got funded out of my dorm room, the research got published, the projects shipped. I also cycled around Philadelphia a lot.

Mahindra United World College of India

Two years of IB at Mahindra United World College (50% scholarship). One of 18 schools worldwide that "makes education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future." My class: 120 students from 60+ countries, village kids next to royalty, on a campus that lives the UWC values of international understanding, service, and personal challenge. The IB diploma was the smallest thing I took away.

Zone 4

Public Speaking

Keynote at Junior Achievement's Entrepreneurship Summit

Unlocking Ambition: Lessons learned as a student entrepreneur

Invited Talk @ Cigna

Explaining artificial intelligence and how it impacts our professional lives

Watch on LinkedIn

Drexel Rising Starters' Competition Keynote

The mindset that got me from intern to co-founder

Is AI Getting Worse?

Make Sense by Lindsay Tabas is a video podcast that simplifies complex issues at the intersection of tech & people.

Zone 5

Projects

MeowLearning

Star

See on Github

This is a pick-your-problem style guide I created to educate everyone, from my leadership team to my ML engineers on working with AI in production settings. This is the stuff you won't learn in most ML/AI courses.

Artificial Manga Panel Dataset

Star

See on Github

I love manga, but I can't read Japanese, and Google Translate's OCR + translation pipeline isn't great with manga text. So I set out to build a speech-bubble detector to localize manga into English faster (which would also help official translators). There was no free, publicly available dataset to train it on, so I generated one.

Second Brain Slipbox

Sneak a peek of my second brain

I read a lot and listen to a lot of podcasts, and most of it leaks out within a week. So I built a Second Brain using the Slipbox Method (Zettelkasten): a system that organizes what I want to keep into an interconnected web.

gwt: Git Worktree Manager

Star

See on Github · PowerShell port

Stupidly simple git worktree management for ZSH (and PowerShell). Smart branch naming, interactive pruning, and automatic config copying so you can hop between parallel workstreams without losing your shell setup. Built because I kept losing track of half-finished branches and re-cloning repos to escape merge-conflict purgatory.

ML Project Template

Star

See on Github

An open-source template repository to kickstart new Machine Learning projects in a standardized way. Originally built for CopyCat's ML team (saving ~2 hours per project), it works for any ML team that wants a repeatable starting point.