Sam Basu left his position as a senior software engineer at Google in early 2023, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT. He tried starting a few AI businesses, but nothing gained traction until a friend called asking for help with customs paperwork.
This 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. The reality of the industry became clear during a FaceTime call with his first customer, who showed him stacks of manila folders in her office. Basu flew to meet her the very next day.
That visit was an eye-opening moment. 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 we use, from watches to glasses. This insight became the seed for Amari AI, a startup he co-founded with Arushi Vashist, a former senior software engineer at LinkedIn.
Amari AI has already attracted more than 30 customers and helped those firms move over $15 billion worth of goods. The company has also raised $4.5 million in funding co-led by First Round Capital and Pear VC, all before announcing its launch.
Basu has two primary goals for Amari. The first is to help customs brokers modernize. 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. Recent chaotic trade policies have made customs brokers more critical than ever. Many importers lack their own compliance staff and rely on brokers to interpret sudden policy changes, especially for goods already in transit. This pressure has contributed to industry-wide burnout. With a tightly regulated workforce and a licensing exam pass rate around 10 to 20 percent, Basu believes the industry is a perfect fit for AI assistance. He pitches Amari 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 clients. Previously, such sudden changes required manual research that slowed down the clearance of cargo. The company builds its own AI models trained on more than one million documents related to shipments it has helped clear, though it currently uses off-the-shelf models as well. Customer data used for training is anonymized, and customers can opt out.
Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital, credits Amari’s early success to Basu’s hands-on approach in learning what brokers need by attending conferences and trade shows, which built strong word-of-mouth in an old-school industry.
It was at a National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America trade show that Basu’s presentation caught the attention of Chris Bachinski, CEO of the 125-year-old firm GHY International. Bachinski, an early adopter of Amari, has been seeking ways to stay competitive and grow. He acknowledges that his employees’ biggest concern is job loss, but he assures them technology like Amari’s will help the company grow by allowing staff to focus more on customer relationships and complex compliance work.
Bachinski believes technology will shift the industry faster than most customs brokers understand. With trade constantly in the spotlight, brokers need to be agile. He jokes that for the first time in history, his family knows what he does for a living, because customs brokers have become very, very important.