KlearNow.AI

01Who They Are, Right Now

It is 3:14 a.m. on a Tuesday at the Port of Los Angeles. A container of upholstered sofas, four cartons of replacement filters and an unidentified bag of "miscellaneous machinery" sit in a yard while their paperwork makes its eighth trip around someone's Outlook inbox. Somewhere in San Jose, an AI model has already read all of it, parsed it, classified the tariff codes, and pushed an entry summary toward U.S. Customs. The container is moving before anyone has had coffee. This is KlearNow.AI on a slow day.

KlearNow.AI is a logistics-as-a-service company that does something the rest of the supply chain industry has spent forty years politely avoiding: it digitizes customs. Not in the brochure sense - not by adding a portal on top of a fax machine - but in the unglamorous, root-canal sense. It reads the unstructured PDFs, the scanned bills of lading, the photographed packing lists. It turns them into clean structured data. Then it files them, in seconds, with the right authority in the right country, in the right format. It also handles the truck after the container leaves the port, because the company learned early that customs without drayage is half a product.

More than 1,000 organizations now use the platform. That includes customs brokers, freight forwarders and the people who actually own the cargo - furniture brands, food and beverage importers, automotive suppliers, apparel labels, chemicals companies. The platform spans the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Spain and the Netherlands. The team is roughly 250 people. The headquarters is on West Taylor Street in San Jose, which is unromantic in exactly the right way for a company that is in love with paperwork.

02The Problem They Saw

Global trade is, on paper, the most digital industry on earth. It moves $32 trillion of goods a year and is monitored by satellites, cranes the size of office buildings and software that prices freight in milliseconds. On paper. The paper is the problem.

Underneath the slick dashboards, customs clearance has remained an exercise in retyping. A broker receives a commercial invoice as a PDF. Someone reads it. Someone retypes the line items into a customs platform. Someone else checks for errors, of which there are many, because the original PDF was scanned at an angle. The entry is filed. A truck waits. Demurrage clocks tick. If any field is wrong, it all happens again.

The founders of KlearNow.AI noticed two things at once. First, the entire workflow ran on documents that AI was finally good at reading. Second, nobody actually liked it. Customs brokers were drowning in margin pressure. Importers were tired of mysterious delays. Forwarders were trying to grow internationally with a workforce that was effectively a typing pool. The market was waiting for someone to show up with a model that could read a packing list better than a human and not get bored doing it.

Field note: the average commercial invoice contains 47 fields, three typos and one fax artifact. KlearNow.AI thinks this is a feature opportunity, not a bug.

03The Founders' Bet

Sam Tyagi is the CEO and chairman, a serial entrepreneur who came back to global trade after running multiple companies in the logistics and enterprise software space. He co-founded KlearNow with Rick Tellez, a 20-year veteran of the supply chain side of the business, and Ulf Sandberg, a longtime technology executive. The split is meaningful: a deal-maker, a domain expert, a builder. It is the difference between a startup that wants to disrupt customs brokers and one that wants to actually replace what brokers find tedious.

Their bet, in 2018, was that customs would be one of the first places where deep learning models on unstructured documents would pay off in cash. They were a little early. They were not wrong.

The pitch attracted the kind of investors who like industries that have not been touched. GreatPoint Ventures led the $16 million Series A in early 2020, joined by Autotech Ventures, Argean Capital and Monta Vista Capital. Twenty-two months later, with the pandemic having reminded the world what a broken supply chain looks like in real time, Kayne Partners Fund led a $50 million Series B alongside Activate Capital and the existing syndicate. Total funding now stands at roughly $66 million.

04The Product

The platform has three layers that customers tend to discover in sequence. The first is the patented AI/ML data-ingestion engine, which reads unstructured trade documents the way a tired but very fast junior broker reads them - except correctly, and at 3 a.m. The second is Customs Engine, launched in 2023, which packages that capability for customs brokers, forwarders and importers. It automates data extraction, document digitization and the actual filing of ISFs and entry summaries with customs authorities. The third is KlearHub, introduced in January 2024, a collaborative workspace that finally gives every party to a shipment - shipper, broker, forwarder, trucker - a single shared view.

What the product does, in plain language: it takes the most analog corner of the trade world and turns it into an API call. It eliminates retyping. It catches errors before authorities do. It keeps a clean digital ledger of every document and decision, which turns out to be useful when somebody, eventually, asks where that container has been.

Caption: somewhere in this sentence, a customs broker just stopped opening a 14-tab Excel file.

05The Proof

The slide most companies show at this point is a vanity metric. KlearNow.AI has a few of the other kind. Between Series A and Series B, the customer base grew roughly ten-fold and the monthly revenue run rate grew more than fifty-fold. In the two years leading up to its rebrand, revenue grew 30x. Annual revenue is estimated around $26.8 million, which is the kind of number that suggests the inflection point has arrived but the cap table still has room to run.

The customer mix is also telling. KlearNow.AI is not pitching itself as a startup-only tool. The customer advisory council added Sumitomo Corporation of Americas in 2025, the kind of Fortune Global stalwart that does not put its name on logos lightly. Its partnership with project44 extends shipment visibility into customs and drayage, and a separate tie-up with Tive plugs sensor data into the same workflow. The pattern is consistent: KlearNow.AI keeps being the connective tissue, not the headline.

06The Mission

The stated mission is straightforward. Make global trade simple, collaborative and cost-effective. The unstated mission is harder and more interesting. It is to convince an entire industry that the way it has always done things - the manual entries, the email attachments, the photocopied invoices - is no longer compatible with what its customers expect. That is a cultural project as much as a technical one. KlearNow.AI is recruiting brokers to its platform the way an obsolete profession recruits its replacement: gently, with measurable upside, and with a straight face.

It helps that the company is not based in any single country's regulatory worldview. Operations in six countries means the engineering team has internalized the fact that customs is not one thing - it is dozens of things that all look the same from a distance. Building one platform that respects local rules while sharing a common AI core is the technically hard part. It is also the only honest way to do it.

Caption: this is the rare logistics company whose product manager spends as much time with attorneys as with shippers.

07Why It Matters Tomorrow

Pandemic-era supply chain stories have aged into something more durable. Tariff regimes shift quarterly. Origin rules change with each new trade agreement. Nearshoring is real and it is moving cargo into ports that used to be quiet. None of that gets easier with more paperwork. All of it gets easier with software that reads documents instantly, files in the correct format and remembers what it did. The companies that can clear customs in minutes will keep their shelves full. The companies that cannot will keep their lawyers busy.

The macro tailwind is also the moat. Every additional country KlearNow.AI operates in is another regulator's data structure that the model has learned. Every additional document the system ingests improves the next extraction. Customs is one of those rare industries where the boring part is the durable advantage.

Back to that container of sofas at 3:14 a.m. In the old world, a broker would have been wide awake somewhere, retyping the bill of lading, hoping the harmonized tariff code was right, dreading the call from the importer about the missed delivery window. In the KlearNow.AI world, the broker is asleep. The container is moving. The filing is done. The data is in the right place. The work, finally, has been moved off the human and onto the machine that does not mind doing it. That is what the company is for. It is, depending on your taste, either the least glamorous AI story in Silicon Valley or the one with the largest unit of measurement attached. Probably both.