Sam Tyagi built three IT companies and sold every one of them. Then he looked at global trade, saw a mountain of paper forms, and decided customs clearance was worth starting over for. KlearNow.AI is the result.
Most people who sell three companies stop and enjoy it. Sam Tyagi sold three companies, took a private equity seat, and then went looking for the least glamorous problem he could find. He found it in customs clearance - the paperwork that moves cargo across borders, still done, in most of the world, by hand.
That was the opening he wanted. In 2018 he founded KlearNow.AI, a Santa Clara company built on a single conviction: that international trade runs on documents no machine has ever read, and that changing this would be worth a lot of money to a lot of people. Over 1,000 organizations now clear customs on his software. Revenue grew 30x in two years. It is, by any measure, the biggest thing he has built - and the least likely to be described as exciting at a dinner party.
The pitchTyagi has a line he keeps coming back to. He wants to "bring to customs clearance what Uber brought to the transportation business." It is a founder's shorthand, but it is exact. Uber did not invent the car. It took an opaque, phone-and-cash process and made it something you could do from anywhere, at any time, with the friction stripped out. Tyagi wants the same for the moment a shipping container hits a border.
Figure: KlearNow's core promise - turning a document-heavy, opaque process into something instant and visible.
The technical heart of it is unglamorous and clever at the same time. A customs declaration can carry hundreds of fields, scattered across invoices, packing lists and shipping documents in a dozen formats and languages. KlearNow's AI reads those documents, extracts the data, and completes the forms - a task that used to eat hours of a broker's day. "We wanted to create an elegant, technical solution to the inefficiencies of global supply chains that users could access from anywhere in the world, at any time," Tyagi has said.
To understand why anyone would raise tens of millions of dollars for customs software, it helps to know Tyagi had already done the founder-to-exit loop three times before KlearNow. He co-founded Softline, an IT integration and services company, in the mid-1990s. Then Systech Integrators, an SAP shop he built and sold to ACS, a Xerox subsidiary.
Here is the part that sounds made up: he re-acquired Systech from Xerox, turned it around a second time, and sold it again - to Softtek - at triple the value in under three years. One of his companies landed at number two on Entrepreneur Magazine's Hot 100 List. He knows how to buy a business, know it better than its owners, and sell it into a stronger position.
Figure: A four-time company builder - Softline, Systech, Systech again, and now KlearNow.
There is a personal arc under the resume too. Tyagi trained as an engineer at L.D. College of Engineering in India, then took a master's at Oregon State University before landing in Silicon Valley. The path from a Gujarat engineering school to running a private equity practice and a venture-backed startup is not a straight line, and he has walked most of it.
KlearNow raised a $16 million Series A led by GreatPoint Ventures, with Autotech Ventures, Monta Vista Capital and Tyagi's own Argean Capital participating. In December 2021 it closed a $50 million Series B, bringing total funding to around $66 million. The pitch to investors leans on a number Tyagi likes to cite: the WTO estimates that digitizing trade could cut costs by about 6% and add roughly $1 trillion a year to global trade flows.
Figure: KlearNow.AI funding to date. Series B closed December 2021.
The capital funded expansion. KlearNow now operates across the UK, Canada, India and Spain, and the platform has pulled talent from Amazon, Meta, Maersk and Livingston - people who could work anywhere choosing to work on customs clearance. That is its own kind of signal.
The Brexit callOne thing that separates an operator from a hype merchant is timing on real-world events. When Brexit loomed, Tyagi prepared KlearNow's platform for the customs friction UK importers were about to hit. He also said something most vendors would not: he worried publicly about "a two-tier system with priority given to larger importers" while smaller businesses got squeezed. It is not the language of someone selling a magic box. It is the language of someone who has watched how systems actually treat the people at the bottom of them.
During the pandemic, that same practicality showed up. Tyagi framed KlearNow less as a moonshot and more as a way for customers to "recoup time that they'd lost" and reallocate people to more pressing work. The vision is grand - clear, cost-effective, transparent supply chains - but the sell is grounded in hours saved on a Tuesday.
What's nextTyagi's next move borrows a page from the AI platforms of the moment. Rather than only running customs for its own customers, KlearNow plans to package its customs and data engines so that other brokers and freight forwarders can plug advanced AI into their own operations without building it from scratch. It is the shift from being an application to being infrastructure - and if it works, the least glamorous corner of the economy becomes a platform other people build on.
For a founder on his fourth act, that ambition tracks. Tyagi does not seem interested in the easy version of anything. He picked the industry no one wanted, learned it better than most, and is now trying to turn its plumbing into a product. Whether KlearNow becomes the default layer under global trade is still an open question. But the pattern - find the unglamorous, enormous problem, and stay on it longer than everyone else - is one he has run before, and it has paid every time.