Sam Basu quit his job as a senior software engineer at Google in early 2023, shortly after OpenAI launched ChatGPT. He took a few stabs at starting new AI businesses, but nothing really stuck until he got a call from a friend who wanted help filling out customs paperwork.
Basu was “very curious” and began visiting customs officers in the Los Angeles area. He learned that many mom-and-pop businesses are still deeply dependent on fax machines and paper. When his first client showed him stacks of manila folders during a FaceTime tour of her office, everything clicked, Basu told TechCrunch. He flew to this client’s office the next day.
“That was the eye-opening moment. There are only papers and papers,” Basu said in a recent interview. “I was shocked and impressed. I was shocked that this is how the industry works and I was impressed that everything around us, from the watch you wear to the glasses, literally everything that is imported and it happens behind the scenes.”
That seed of an idea is now called Amari AI, a startup co-founded by Basu and Arushi Vashist, a former senior software engineer at LinkedIn. The couple and their small team have already amassed more than 30 clients and helped these 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 Pear VC, all before exiting stealth mode on Thursday.
Basu has two goals with Amari. One is to help customs officers modernize. To date, he said, many of them have done little to integrate new technologies. Some OCR software is being used to speed up data entry, but that technology is limited and fragile, he said. Amari is intended to help automate data entry and paperwork and let employees — who must be legally located in the United Statesmeaning companies can’t use off-shore workers — focus on helping customers move their goods across borders.
That’s where the second goal comes in. President Donald Trump’s chaotic trade policy has made customs brokers even more important, according to Chris Bachinski, CEO of 125-year-old GHY International. Bachinski — who is an early adopter of Amari — told TechCrunch that many of his clients don’t even have their own compliance staff. Instead, they look to brokers like GHY to help understand how sudden changes in trade policy apply to their goods, especially if they are already in transit.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 9, 2026
This chaos has led to burnout across the industry, according to Basu. With a strictly regulated employee base, and a pass rate on licensing exams ranging from 10% to 20%, “it’s a perfect fit for AI,” he said.
“Experienced people are leaving the industry or retiring early,” Basu said. “So we present ourselves as those extra hands that logistics companies can hire or retain alongside human expertise.”
Basu said Amari’s AI agents constantly monitor trade rules and update their reasoning whenever there is a change, making it easier for brokers to help their clients quickly understand any impact. Previously, these kinds of sudden changes required manual research that would slow down brokers’ ability to carry cargo into the country.
Amari does this by building its own AI models that have been trained on more than a million documents related to the shipments it has already helped clear through customs, though Basu said the company has leveraged off-the-shelf models to date. He noted that some customers opt out of this training and that Amari anonymizes the data before feeding it to the models.
“We don’t sell their data and we make sure it’s theirs,” he said. “They are very serious about these documents.”
Todd Jackson, partner at First Round Capital, attributed Amari’s early success to Basu’s willingness to hit the pavement to learn what these brokers need.
“He will go to conferences, he will go to trade shows, [and] word of mouth is starting to get really strong,” Jackson said in an interview. “It’s an old industry.”
It was at one of these trade shows—the National Association of Customs Brokers and Forwarders of America, to be exact—that one of Basu’s presentations caught Bachinski’s eye. GHY International isn’t mom and pop, but it’s also not a Fortune 500 like FedEx. Bachinski was looking for ways to both stay competitive and grow his company.
Bahinski said the biggest concern among GHY workers so far has been job losses. But he told them not to worry. He said he expects technology like Amari to help GHY grow and focus more on customer relations and compliance work.
“It’s an old industry and technology is going to shift our industry faster than I think most customs agents realize,” he said. And with trading now constantly in the spotlight, he said brokers need to be flexible. “I make this joke that last year, for the first time in history, our families know what we do for a living. Because all of a sudden, customs brokers have become very, very important.”
