These former Big Tech engineers are using AI to navigate Trump’s trade chaos

Sam Basu left his job as a senior software engineer at Google in early 2023, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT. He tried a few different ideas for AI startups, but none of them really took off until a friend called asking for help filling out customs paperwork.

Basu said he got “very curious” and began cold-calling customs brokers across the Los Angeles area. He quickly discovered that many brokerage firms are still small, family-run businesses that rely heavily on fax machines and paper documents. During a FaceTime tour of one customer’s office, the broker showed Basu stacks of manila folders — and that was the moment everything clicked, Basu said. He flew out the next day to visit the office.

“That was the eye-opening moment. There’s just papers and papers,” Basu said in a recent interview. “I was both shocked and impressed. Shocked that this is how the industry runs, and impressed that everything around us, from the watch that you’re wearing to the glasses, literally everything that’s imported, and this is what’s happening behind the scenes.”

That early idea has since grown into Amari AI, a startup co-founded by Basu and Arushi Vashist, a former senior software engineer at LinkedIn. Basu and Vashist, along with their small team, have already signed up more than 30 customers and say they’ve helped those firms move more than $15 billion worth of goods.

Amari has also raised $4.5 million in funding, co-led by early-stage firms First Round Capital and Pear VC, ahead of its Thursday emergence from stealth mode.

Basu said he has two main goals for Amari. The first is to help customs brokers modernise. He said many brokers have done little to adopt newer technologies. Some use optical character recognition software to speed up data entry, but Basu described that approach as limited and brittle. Amari aims to automate data entry and paperwork so employees — who must legally be located in the United States, meaning companies can’t simply outsource the work offshore — can focus on helping customers move goods across the border.

Basu’s second goal is tied to the growing importance of brokers amid a volatile trade environment. President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy has made customs brokers increasingly critical, according to Chris Bachinski, CEO of 125-year-old firm GHY International. Bachinski, one of Amari’s early users, said many of his clients don’t even have internal compliance teams. Instead, they rely on brokers like GHY to interpret how sudden trade policy shifts apply to their shipments — especially if goods are already in transit.

Basu said this constant disruption has pushed many in the industry toward burnout. With the workforce tightly regulated and a licensing exam pass rate that sits around 10% to 20%, he said, “it’s a perfect fit for AI.”

“Experienced people are leaving the industry or taking early retirement,” Basu said. “So we’re pitching ourselves as this extra set of hands that logistics companies can hire or keep alongside the human expertise.”

Basu said Amari’s AI agents continuously track changes in trade rules and update their reasoning when policies shift, allowing brokers to explain how new rules affect customers quickly. In the past, he said, these sudden shifts required manual research, slowing brokers’ ability to clear cargo into the country.

Amari is building its own AI models trained on more than one million documents tied to shipments it has already helped clear through customs, though Basu said the company has primarily used off-the-shelf models so far. He noted that some customers choose to opt out of the model training, and that Amari anonymises data before using it for training.

“We do not sell their data, and we make sure that their data is theirs,” Basu said. “They’re very serious about these documents.”

Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital, said Amari’s early momentum is largely due to Basu’s hands-on approach and deep understanding of what brokers actually need.

“He’s going to conferences, he’s going to trade shows, [and] the word of mouth starts to get very strong,” Jackson said in an interview. “It’s an old-school industry.”

It was at one of those trade shows — the National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America — that one of Basu’s presentations stood out to Bachinski. GHY International isn’t a mom-and-pop operation, but it’s not a Fortune 500 company like FedEx either. Bachinski said he has been searching for tools that can help GHY stay competitive while continuing to grow.

Bachinski said the biggest worry among some of his employees has been job loss, but he told them not to be concerned. He said he expects technology like Amari’s to help GHY expand and free staff to focus on customer relationships and compliance.

“It’s an old industry, and technology is going to shift our industry faster than I think most customs brokers understand,” he said. And with trade now regularly making headlines, he said brokers have to stay agile. “I make this joke that last year, the first time in history, our families knew what we do for a living. Because all of a sudden, custom brokers became very, very important.”