Caspian is a San Francisco-based startup building the first AI-native trade advisory platform for international supply chains, with an initial focus on duty drawback and tariff refund processing. Founded in 2024 by Justin Sherlock and Matt Ebeweber, the company emerged from stealth in 2025 to tackle one of the most opaque and underutilized areas of global trade: recovering duties and tariffs that importers and exporters are legally entitled to reclaim.
Duty drawback, the refund of customs duties paid on imported goods that are later exported or destroyed, is notoriously complex. The eligibility rules, documentation requirements, and filing processes are so byzantine that most companies leave significant refunds on the table simply because the manual work required to identify and substantiate claims is prohibitive. Caspian's platform ingests and analyzes a company's international shipping and inventory data, automatically identifies eligible refunds, and assembles and submits the claims.
What sets Caspian apart is its regulatory standing. The company is a US-licensed customs broker and a CBP-approved ABI (Automated Broker Interface) software vendor, a rare combination for a technology startup. This allows Caspian to file claims directly with US Customs and Border Protection on behalf of clients, or to partner with large enterprises, customs brokers, and freight forwarders. The result is a platform that compresses a process that traditionally takes months into a matter of days.
Caspian raised a $5.4 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners, with major investment from Blank Ventures. The company is positioned at the intersection of AI, trade compliance, and supply chain finance, an area that has gained urgency as tariffs and trade policy shifts have made duty optimization a board-level concern for import-heavy businesses. By turning a manual, advisory-led process into an AI-driven, software-native one, Caspian aims to make trade compliance and duty recovery accessible to far more companies.