Introducing Amari: the AI workforce helping US customs brokers navigate global trade chaos

When a person crosses a border, they show a passport. But when a product crosses a border, it has to show thousands of data points, like materials, origin, safety certifications, and shifting duty implications. Almost every item in your home, from the shoes you're wearing to the phone you're holding, was manually cleared by someone in a logistics office typing data into a computer while racing against a clock. A single typo can trap that cargo at the port, and the resulting fees stack up fast.

2025 saw the most aggressive trade-policy shifts in decades. With the suspension of the de minimis exemption, 1.3 billion annual packages that used to fly under the radar now require full customs scrutiny. “Reciprocal” tariff rules are constantly being rewritten, taxing products based on where they come from, not just what they are. It has become humanly impossible to keep up.

Doing the work, not just recording it

Today, we are introducing Amari: the first autonomous AI workforce built to think, reason, and act its way through the complexities of global trade, starting with the hardest problem in the supply chain: customs. 

We’re working to make moving goods across the physical world as seamless as moving data across the internet. Our agents sit on top of existing systems of records and handle the repetitive work and coordination that usually requires dozens of people to manage. They don’t just parse data; they reason. 

Solving the "Friday afternoon" disaster

Instead of having to stop everything to manually research new rules, update spreadsheets, and hunt down missing data from factories whenever regulations change, Amari identifies that a regulation changed the moment it’s published. Let’s say a new rule or enforcement gets announced on a Friday afternoon. 

• The old way: Monday morning is a scramble. Your team has to stop clearing cargo to research the new rules and hunt for missing factory data. Backlogs pile up, margins get eaten by overtime, and your clients are hit with storage fees.

• The Amari way: Our system identifies a change the moment it’s published. Over the weekend, our AI agents re-read the regulation and update the logic for those shipments automatically. By Monday morning, the new playbook is already live. Your team just reviews the filings and moves on.

  
  

Powering over 30 customs brokers plus new funding to scale

Since we officially entered the customs space 14 months ago, we’ve seen how desperate the industry is for this level of automation. Today, Amari is already powering over 30 leading firms, ranging from GHY, a storied firm with 125 years of history, to modern specialists like JAAK Transport. Our agents are already helping move $15B of goods annually and many of these firms are cutting their clearance times in half.

But for these teams, this isn’t just about speed. The industry is under acute talent pressure: tariff volatility has turned customs into a much more stressful job, and employees are retiring early due to burnout. By reducing clearance times and removing repetitive manual work, Amari helps firms scale their businesses and focus on the complex, high-value decisions that keep cargo moving. For employees working nights and weekends just to keep up, Amari becomes the extra set of hands that lets them go home to their families on time.

To support this work, we’ve raised over $4.5 million in funding co-led by First Round Capital and Pear VC, with participation from Hustle Fund, Character Capital, and angels who helped build companies like Webflow, Vercel, and Google. Most importantly, three of our early customers invested in the round. 

My CTO, Arushi, and I are builders first. After years at Google and LinkedIn, we decided to apply what we’d learned about large-scale systems to solve the biggest bottleneck in the supply chain. We’re building Amari with the same technical excellence we used at our previous roles, but with a focus on solving a problem that actually matters to the people moving the world’s cargo.

If you’re ready to build the next era of autonomous trade, check out our open roles in San Francisco. If you’re a customs brokerage firm interested in learning more, we’d love to show you Amari in action.