"He took a few stabs at starting new AI businesses, but nothing really stuck until he got a call from a friend who wanted help filling out customs paperwork. Basu got "very curious" and started cold-calling customs brokers in the Los Angeles area. He learned that many are mom-and-pop affairs still deeply reliant on fax machines and paper. When his first customer showed him stacks of manila folders during a FaceTime tour of her office, everything clicked, Basu told TechCrunch."
""That was the eye-opening moment. There's just papers and papers," Basu said in a recent interview. "I was both shocked and impressed. Shocked that this is how the industry runs, and impressed that everything around us, from the watch that you're wearing to the glasses, literally everything that's imported, and this is what's happening behind the scenes." This seed of an idea is now called Amari AI, a startup co-founded by Basu and Arushi Vashist,"
"Amari has also raised $4.5 million of funding co-led by preeminent early-stage firms First Round Capital and Pear VC, all before coming out of stealth mode on Thursday. Basu has two goals with Amari. One is to help customs brokers modernize. To date, he said, many of them have done little work to integrate new technologies. Some leverage optical character recognition software to help speed up data entry, but that tech is limited and brittle, he said."
A former Google engineer discovered that many customs brokers operate as mom-and-pop firms dependent on fax machines and paper. He and a co-founder launched Amari AI to automate data entry and paperwork for customs brokers, aiming to modernize an industry that has integrated little new technology. The startup has signed more than 30 customers and helped move over $15 billion of goods. Investors committed $4.5 million in early funding. Amari focuses on replacing brittle OCR workflows and freeing U.S.-based employees to concentrate on moving customers' goods across the border.
Read at TechCrunch
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