Sam Basu left his job as a senior software engineer at Google in early 2023, not long after OpenAI released ChatGPT. He tried several times to start a new AI business, but nothing really clicked until he got a call from a friend who wanted help with customs paperwork.
Bass became “very interested” and began calling customs brokers in the Los Angeles area. He learned that many families still rely heavily on fax and paper. Basu told TechCrunch that when his first customer showed him a stack of manila folders during a FaceTime tour of his office, everything clicked. He flew to the client’s office the next day.
“That was an eye-opening moment. There was just paperwork,” Bass said in a recent interview. “I was shocked and impressed at the same time. I was shocked that this industry operated the way it did. And I was impressed that literally everything around us, from the watches you wear to the glasses you wear, is imported and this is what’s happening behind the scenes.”
This seed idea is now called Amari AI. The startup was co-founded by Basu and Arushi Vashst, a former senior software engineer at LinkedIn. The duo and their small team have already amassed more than 30 customers and helped those companies move more than $15 billion in goods.
Amari also raised $4.5 million in funding co-led by prominent early-stage firms First Round Capital and Peer VC before coming out of stealth mode on Thursday.
Bass scored two goals with Amari. One is to help modernize customs brokers. So far, many have done little to integrate new technology, he said. Some companies are using optical character recognition software to speed up data entry, but the technology is limited and vulnerable, he said. Amari aims to help automate data entry and paperwork, allowing employees (who are legally required to be in the US, meaning companies can’t use offshore workers) to focus on helping customers move goods across borders.
That’s where the second goal comes into play. President Donald Trump’s chaotic trade policies have made customs brokers even more important, said Chris Baczynski, CEO of GHY International, a 125-year-old company. Baczynski, one of Amari’s early adopters, told TechCrunch that many of his customers don’t even have a dedicated compliance officer. Instead, they look to brokers like GHY to understand how sudden changes in trade policy apply to their goods, especially if they are already in transit.
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Bass says the disruption is leading to burnout across the industry. “It’s perfect for AI,” he says, because the employee base is highly regulated and licensing exam pass rates hover around 10% to 20%.
“Experienced talent is leaving the industry or taking early retirement,” Bass said. “So we are marketing ourselves as an additional headcount that logistics companies can hire and retain alongside their human expertise.”
Bass said Amari’s AI agent constantly monitors trade rules and updates its inferences as changes occur, making it easier for brokers to help customers understand the impact immediately. Previously, these types of sudden changes required manual inspection, reducing brokers’ ability to clear cargo into the country.
Amari does this by building its own AI models trained on more than 1 million documents related to shipments the company has already helped clear through customs, but Bass said the company has so far leveraged off-the-shelf models. He noted that some customers have opted out of this training and that Amari anonymizes the data before feeding it to the model.
“We don’t sell their data. We make sure their data is theirs,” he said. “They take these documents very seriously.”
Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital, attributed Amari’s early success to its willingness to keep pounding the pavement to learn what these brokers need.
“He goes to conferences and exhibitions; [and] “Word of mouth is starting to get really strong. This is an old-school industry,” Jackson said in an interview.
It was at one of these trade shows (the National Association of Customs Brokers and Carriers, to be exact) that one of the bus presentations caught Baczynski’s attention. GHY International is not a mom-and-pop company, but it’s also not a Fortune 500 company like FedEx. Baczynski has been looking for ways to stay competitive and grow the company.
Baczynski said the biggest concern for GHY employees so far is job loss. But he told them not to worry. He said he expects technologies like Amari to help GHY grow and focus more on customer relationships and compliance operations.
“This is an old industry, and technology will change it faster than most customs brokers realize,” he said. Brokers also need to be nimble as trade is always in the spotlight, he said. “I joke that last year, for the first time in history, our families started to know what we do for a living, because all of a sudden customs brokers became very important.”
