Penny Chen

Penny Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Pax, the Y Combinator (S24) startup rebuilding duty drawback - the U.S. program that refunds import tariffs - as an AI-native brokerage. An MIT PhD and former research scientist at Amazon and Flexport, she stumbled on duty drawback while building supply-chain algorithms and saw a math problem hiding inside a bureaucratic one: each year roughly $10-15 billion in eligible refunds go unclaimed because legacy brokers take 10-20% and won't touch claims under $100k. Pax turns the rulebook into algorithms and LLM data extraction, promising a TurboTax-style experience that cuts filing from 9-12 months to a few weeks. The company raised $4.5M in seed funding led by Initialized Capital in April 2025.