Sam Basu left his position as a senior software engineer at Google in early 2023, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT. He tried starting several AI businesses, but none gained traction until a friend called for help with customs paperwork.
That request sparked his curiosity. Basu began cold-calling customs brokers in the Los Angeles area and discovered many are small, family-run operations still deeply reliant on fax machines and paper. When his first customer gave him a FaceTime tour of her office, showing stacks of manila folders, everything clicked for him. Basu flew to her office the next day.
He described that moment as eye-opening. He was both shocked and impressed—shocked that this is how the global import industry operates behind the scenes, and impressed that it manages to move everything from watches to glasses using such methods.
This idea became Amari AI, a startup co-founded by Basu and Arushi Vashist, a former senior software engineer at LinkedIn. Their small team has already signed more than thirty customers and helped those firms move over fifteen billion dollars worth of goods.
Amari has also raised four and a half million dollars in funding, co-led by the early-stage firms First Round Capital and Pear VC. This all happened before the company came out of stealth mode.
Basu has two primary goals for Amari. The first is to help customs brokers modernize. He notes that many have done little to integrate new technologies. Some use basic optical character recognition software, but that technology is limited. Amari aims to automate data entry and paperwork, allowing employees—who must legally be based in the United States—to focus on helping customers move goods across the border.
This leads to the second goal. According to Chris Bachinski, CEO of the 125-year-old firm GHY International, the chaotic trade policies of recent years have made customs brokers more critical than ever. Bachinski, an early adopter of Amari, explained that many of his customers lack their own compliance staff. They rely on brokers to navigate sudden changes in trade policy, especially for goods already in transit.
Basu says this chaos has led to industry-wide burnout. With a tightly regulated employee base and a licensing exam pass rate around ten to twenty percent, he believes the industry is a perfect fit for AI. Experienced people are leaving or retiring, so Amari pitches itself as an extra set of hands that logistics companies can use alongside human expertise.
Amari’s AI agents constantly monitor trade rules and update their reasoning with any change, helping brokers quickly understand the impact on their customers. Previously, such sudden changes required manual research, slowing down the entire process of clearing cargo.
The company builds its own AI models trained on more than one million documents related to shipments it has helped clear. Basu notes they have used off-the-shelf models to date and that some customers opt out of this training. Amari anonymizes all data before feeding it to the models and does not sell customer data.
Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital, credits Amari’s early success to Basu’s hands-on approach. Basu attended conferences and trade shows to learn what brokers need, building strong word-of-mouth in an old-school industry.
It was at a National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America trade show where Basu’s presentation caught Bachinski’s eye. GHY International is a midsize company looking to stay competitive and grow. Bachinski says the biggest concern among his employees has been job loss, but he assures them technology like Amari’s will help the company grow and allow them to focus more on customer relationships and complex compliance work.
He acknowledges that technology will shift the industry faster than most brokers understand. With trade constantly in the spotlight, brokers need to be agile. Bachinski jokes that for the first time in history, his family knows what he does for a living, because customs brokers have suddenly become very, very important.