trade-compliance
(5)
Terrell Marshall
Terrell Marshall is the founder and CEO of Passage (YC S24), a San Francisco startup building an AI co-pilot for customs brokers and trade compliance teams. Before Passage, he worked on AI products used by more than a billion people at Google, including Google Photos, Google Payments, and Hotels Search, and was a software engineer at Workday. He co-founded Passage with Aditya Nadkarni, a college friend with whom he also holds a patent for an AI physical therapy platform. Passage automates the manual data entry and email correspondence that customs teams spend hours on, pulling data from commercial invoices, bills of lading, and packing lists to pre-fill entry filings and validate compliance.
Sam Tyagi
Sam Tyagi is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and the founder, CEO and chairman of KlearNow.AI, an AI-powered platform that digitizes customs clearance and drayage to make global supply chains clearer, faster and cheaper. Before KlearNow he built and exited three IT integration companies, including Softline and Systech, and he is a managing partner at Argean Capital. He often frames his mission as bringing to customs clearance what Uber brought to transportation.
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.
Rick Tellez
Rick Tellez is the Co-Founder of KlearNow.AI, an AI-powered platform digitizing customs clearance and trade compliance for importers, freight forwarders, and customs brokers. Drawing on 20+ years of logistics expertise at DHL, Tellez co-founded KlearNow in 2018 to automate the manual, error-prone paperwork that bottlenecks global trade. The company has raised $69 million in funding, serves over 1,000 organizations, and generates $26.8M in annual recurring revenue.
Justin Sherlock
Justin Sherlock is the Co-Founder and CEO of Caspian, an AI-native trade advisory platform tackling the $130 billion in unclaimed duty refunds sitting in global supply chains. A Harvard economist and Wharton MBA, he spent five years at Flexport scaling its financing arm past $1 billion before going out to build what he saw was missing: automated customs intelligence that actually gets importers their money back.