Customs brokerage is the invisible backbone of global trade. Every product that crosses a border—from your smartphone to your clothes—depends on it. Yet it still runs on manual data entry, spreadsheets, and teams racing against constantly shifting regulations.
Sam Basu and Arushi Vashist are building Amari AI to change that. It’s the first autonomous AI workforce built to think, reason, and act its way through the complexities of global trade.
And today, we’re excited to announce our seed investment in Amari. The $4.5 million round was co-led by Pear and First Round Capital, with participation from Hustle Fund, Character Capital, and angel investors who helped build Webflow, Vercel, and Google.
How we met
People often ask what I look for in founders. When I met Sam, I immediately felt his intensity. But what stood out more was how deeply he understood his customer.
Before writing a line of code, he cold-called customs brokers. He did multiple FaceTime tours of offices overflowing with paperwork. He watched operators manually re-enter the same data across systems and scramble every time a new rule dropped on a Friday afternoon.
Arushi brings the same builder mindset. After years at Google and LinkedIn, they chose to apply that technical depth to one of the least glamorous and most critical layers of the global economy.
Why we invested
Amari is solving a massive problem for which AI is a perfect match: the literal mountain of manual paperwork that keeps global trade moving. New tariffs and shifting trade regulations have made an already complex job even more challenging
Amari uses specialized AI agents to automate customs data entry and interpret complex, shifting trade regulations in real time. Instead of reacting days later, their system identifies a regulatory change the moment it’s published. It re-reads the rule, updates the logic, and prepares filings for review.
Today, Amari is already powering over 30 firms, from GHY, a 125-year-old industry leader, to modern operators like JAAK Transport. Their agents are helping move $15B in goods annually, and many customers are cutting clearance times in half.
What’s next for Amari AI
Customs is just the beginning for Amari AI.
Sam and Arushi are working to make moving goods across the physical world as seamless as moving data across the internet, starting by bringing intelligence and automation to the most painful bottleneck in the system.
We’re proud to partner with Sam, Arushi, and the entire Amari team as they build the AI infrastructure powering the next era of global commerce.