When the goods enter the USA, they need to be declared to us so that the importer may be charged with appropriate taxes. This applies to every part from consumers ordering clothes, from a foreign brand to every item on a huge container ship.
When it comes to industrial import, filling the mandatory documents is manual and tedious. Many large importers either build their very own internal method or outsource the practice of a customs broker. Docunlock wants to automate the process.
Docunlock It is a platform used by customs brokers to improve the filling of the mandatory documents in need of importers. Docunlock integrates with a non -standard E -Mail Broker and routinely transfers the appropriate E -Maile and documents to Docunlock. The platform uses artificial intelligence to aggregate the mandatory unstructured data to complete these forms. Customs brokers take it from there.
“We will mark them with some important details and will simply make their lives much easier and more efficient,” said Sepehr Fakour, co-founder of Docunlock. “They can focus on doing the best in which he uses his domain knowledge to make sure that everything is done in accordance with the customs regulations and everything is correctly classified, etc., and not spend time by hand by manually pressing copying and pasteing eight hours daily. “
Ned Cartmell, co -founder of Fakour, told Techcrunch that he experienced this first -hand problem while working at Flexport. There, he said, the form of solutions that they threw on it, he included from building software to properties, individuals who are hand -trying to fix it and are looking for external solutions.
“Ultimately, we introduced a lot of improvement in a way that worked for Flexport, but we did not get close to eliminating it as we thought we would be able to,” said Cartmell. “So I was obsessed with the problem.”
When AI’s progress began to appear in 2022, Cartmell and Fakour noticed the opportunity. They met with many customs brokers to see if their experience with the process adapted to Cartmell’s in Flexport. They discovered that it was for the most part.
“Even the first broker sitting opposite us in combination with enlargement, for example, almost like catching us and saying:” Please, leave us without anything, “said Fakour. “It seemed quite a strong validation signal.”
Docunlock was founded in 2023 and began with the basic version of the product. The prototype is enough to sign customers, so they began building it. Since then, the company has recorded a strong increase. Docunlock refused to have detailed information about the company’s customer database, but said he had a 100% retention index and is gaining a significant increase in the mouth.
The company has recently collected $ 3 million for financing pre-fired from a VC mixture, including GTMFund and Barrel Ventures, in addition to angel investors, including Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, co-founders of Algolia-Bedded Employer Fakour-I early Flexport employees.
Above Goods value USD 4.1 trillion They were brought to the United States themselves in 2024. Fakour said that the customs broker market can be heard and covered by a mixture of several thousand corporations in the USA, from shops with mother and pop to larger organizations, in addition to brokers in other countries. This is a significant and distributed market so that Docunlock can solve.
Docunlock hopes that its platform can automate the tedious points of customs brokers so that they will focus on using their specialist knowledge to move this always changing field.
“This is something that people really don’t know anything about,” Cartmell said about this customs process. “And you know, for a reason. It happens in the background, but it touches everything. Every time anything enters or leaves any country, this process happens. “