Passage Is Automating the Most Tedious Job in Global Trade

Almost everyone has waited for a package stuck somewhere in customs. Now picture a company doing that thousands of times a month, with containers instead of parcels, and forms instead of a tracking number. Behind each of those shipments sits a person keying numbers into a government filing, hoping a mismatched digit doesn't stall the whole thing. Passage is building software for that person.

The company, part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, describes itself plainly: "An AI co-pilot that helps businesses clear their imported goods through customs." That understatement hides a large, unglamorous market. Customs brokers and freight forwarders employ teams of entry writers whose days are spent reading invoices, retyping the same figures into different forms, matching product descriptions to tariff codes, and answering a steady stream of email. It is careful, repetitive work where mistakes carry real cost.

01 / What It DoesReading the paperwork so people don't have to

Passage sits on top of the documents that move cargo: commercial invoices, bills of lading, and packing lists. It extracts the data from those documents, then checks them against each other so a quantity on the invoice matches the quantity on the packing list before anything is filed. From there it prepares the customs entry and drafts the routine correspondence that surrounds it.

The classification step is where the work gets thorniest. Every imported product has to be matched to a code in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTSUS), a document thousands of pages long. The wrong code can mean the wrong duty. Passage maps product descriptions to HTSUS codes and researches the cross-rulings and anti-dumping (ADD) and countervailing duty (CVD) orders that back a given choice - reading that brokers rarely have time to do thoroughly.

02 / The People Behind ItCollege roommates, then co-founders

Passage was founded in 2024 by Terrell Marshall and Aditya Nadkarni, who were roommates in college before they were co-founders. Their backgrounds split the problem neatly. Marshall, the CEO, spent years at Google building products used by more than a billion people, including Google Photos, Google Payments, and Hotels Search, with earlier engineering work at Workday. Nadkarni, the CTO, worked on Flexport's AI and document-processing team and at Artera, a startup focused on doctor-patient communication.

That Flexport experience matters. The hard part of customs software is not the interface; it is understanding the documents, the codes, and the failure modes well enough to be trusted with a filing. Nadkarni had already spent time inside that machinery. Marshall knew how to ship AI features at scale to non-technical users. The pairing is the pitch.

03 / Who It ServesThe teams nobody sees

Passage's customers are customs brokers, freight forwarders, and the in-house trade-compliance teams at companies importing goods into the United States. These are not consumers, and they are not looking for novelty. They want fewer errors, faster turnaround per shipment, and a paper trail that holds up. The software is positioned as a co-pilot - it speeds up the entry writers and brokers already doing the job, keeping a human in the loop rather than removing them.

04 / Where It FitsArm the workers, don't replace them

The customs world already has software - legacy filing tools and brokerage service providers - and it has digital forwarders like Flexport addressing adjacent parts of the supply chain. Passage's wedge is narrower and more specific: the manual, document-heavy work of preparing an entry. Rather than promising to automate brokers out of existence, it aims at the tedious majority of their day and leaves the judgment calls to them.

It is a deliberately unfashionable place to start a company, which is part of what makes it interesting. The problem is high-volume, high-stakes, and universally disliked by the people doing it. That combination is exactly where a co-pilot tends to earn its keep.

05 / The BusinessSoftware sold by the shipment

Passage is a B2B software business aimed at compliance teams and brokerages. The value proposition is straightforward: fewer hours per shipment, fewer errors that turn into penalties, and less time lost to email. The company remains small - a two-person team as of its YC batch - and specific pricing and funding beyond Y Combinator's backing have not been made public. In September 2024 it pitched at YC Demo Day and was named among TechCrunch's companies worth watching from that day.

Whether Passage becomes the default tool for customs teams or one option among several will depend on trust, which in this market is earned filing by filing. For now, it has done the harder-than-it-looks work of picking a real problem that most engineers would never think to touch, and pointing modern AI directly at it.