When goods enter the U.S., they have to be declared to U.S. customs so the importer can be charged the proper taxes. That applies to everything from a consumer ordering clothes from a brand based overseas to every single item on a massive container ship.
When it comes to commercial importing, filling out the necessary paperwork is manual and tedious. Many large importers either build their own internal method or outsource the practice to a customs broker. DocUnlock wants to automate the process.
DocUnlock is a platform used by customs brokers to streamline filling out the necessary documents importers need. DocUnlock integrates into a custom broker’s email and automatically forwards relevant emails and documents to DocUnlock. The platform uses AI to aggregate the necessary unstructured data to fill out these forms. Customs brokers take it from there.
“We will flag certain important details to them and just really make their lives way easier and more efficient,” said DocUnlock co-founder Sepehr Fakour. “They can focus on doing what they’re best at which is using their domain knowledge to make sure that everything is being done according to customs regulations and everything is classified correctly, etc., and not spending their time manually pushing copy and paste for eight hours a day.”
Ned Cartmell, Fakour’s co-founder, told TechCrunch that he experienced this problem first hand while working at Flexport. There, he said, the type of solutions they threw at it ranged from building propriety software, having humans manually try to fix it and looking for outside solutions.
“Ultimately, we made a big improvement in the way that worked for Flexport but didn’t come close to eliminating it the way that we thought we would be able to,” Cartmell said. “So I kind of got obsessed with the problem.”
When the advancements of AI started rolling out in 2022, Cartmell and Fakour noticed an opportunity. They met with numerous customs brokers to see if their experience with the process aligned with Cartmell’s at Flexport. They found that it overwhelmingly did.
“Even the very first one, the broker sitting across from us in the in the Zoom call, like, almost like grabbing hold of us and saying, ‘Please don’t leave us without doing something,’” Fakour said. “That seemed like a pretty strong signal of validation.”
DocUnlock was founded in 2023 and started with a rudimentary version of the product. The prototype was enough to sign customers, so they started building it out further. The company has since seen strong growth. DocUnlock declined to share details on the company’s customer base but said it has 100% retention rate and is getting a substantial amount of growth through word of mouth.
The company recently raised $3 million in pre-seed funding from a mix of VCs including GTMFund and Barrel Ventures, in addition to angel investors including Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, the co-founders of Algolia — Fakour’s former employer — and early Flexport employees.
More than $4.1 trillion worth of goods were imported into the U.S. alone in 2024. Fakour said that the customs broker market is sprawling and includes a mix of several thousand companies in the U.S., ranging from mom and pop shops to larger organizations, as well as brokers in other countries. This makes for a substantial, and scattered, market for DocUnlock to tackle.
DocUnlock hopes its platform can automate the tedious aspects of a customs brokers’ job so they can focus on using their domain expertise to navigate this constantly changing field.
“It’s something that people really know nothing about,” Cartmell said about this customs process. “And, you know, sort of for good reason. It’s happening in the background, but it’s touching everything. Every time anything enters or leaves any country, there’s this process that happens.”
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