If tariffs, port strikes and the Red Sea crisis are the plights putting companies in distress, Flexport is looking to be the platform in shining armor that comes to save the day.
At its recent Fall 2025 Technology Release, founder and CEO Ryan Petersen began with the company’s simple mission: “We want to make global trade so easy that there will be more trade,” he said.
And in this current climate, where fee hikes and fallouts are so common they’re now built into contingency plans, trade has been anything but easy.
Flexport, which bills itself as the first technology platform to “connect the entire ecosystem of global trade,” wants to help companies do four key things: manage customs, enhance visibility, reduce real costs and unlock growth—and at the end of the day, all are tied to boosting profits.
“We want to put real dollars on your bottom line,” Petersen told an audience of attendees tuned into the presentation. “That’s what you think about probably the most when you think about logistics.”
Its first answer to that is the Flexport Customs Technology Suite, a set of tools for customs compliance that had already been in development but underwent some replanning once the April 2 Liberation Day tariffs hit. Its key offer, which soft-launched in June, is a tariff simulator that allows Flexport customers to input HS (harmonized system) codes and calculate what duties will be owed. The company rolled out a Pro version of the technology at its Release event this month, which allows customers to upload a CSV file of HS codes and get duties calculated for them. And, as Petersen added, “If one of your HTS codes is subject to new duties in the United States, we will alert you immediately when that happens and when it actually goes live—not when the president posts about it on Truth Social.” Beyond the tariff simulator, partner government agencies also help Flexport customers understand things like USDA and FDA requirements as part of the tech suite.
Despite the push for digitization more than a decade ago, many companies are still functioning off of spreadsheets and data in disparate places, including individuals’ inboxes. In response, Flexport built technology that can extract customers’ data from Customs and Border Protection—going back as far as five years—to help companies see all transactions and start to build insights and action plans from it.
“This is how CBP sees you, so you want to see what they’re seeing,” Petersen said. “This becomes our shared roadmap for our team of experts of technology and trade exports to sit with you and develop a plan. We can usually find ways to unlock cost savings, reduce risk. We’re going to find some compliance opportunities and, in many cases get you refunds…[even] go back five years and apply for those [refunds] if you haven’t done that.”
Where compliance teams have historically reviewed roughly 10 percent of customs entries for accuracy, Flexport’s AI-powered compliance audit technology can now review 100 percent of entries for accuracy before they are filed, something that Petersen stressed “really matters.”
“We had a customer come to us recently who had been working with another broker. They were importing T-shirts that had pictures of horses on them and their broker accidentally filed these as live horses, livestock. Now, as you can imagine, these did not have the same treatment at CBP, different duty rates and all sorts of problems ensued,” Petersen said. Think of this technology as an “AI-powered spell check fine-tuned on the world’s customs data. We’re still doing the really hard work of getting accurate filings, but we empower our experts to be much better.”
Flexport’s Insights Builder also got an update with access to customs data, so users can generate reports from their customs data without the need of a data scientist, but it’s the company’s efforts around duty drawbacks that may really be the bottom line benefit.
Right now, companies are missing out on significant savings by not claiming duty drawbacks—or refunds owed on duties and fees paid for imported goods that are later exported. “Every year, over $7 billion that businesses are owed goes unclaimed,” Petersen said. “And that was before the tariffs went way up, so it’s probably much higher. That’s just a huge amount of waste, and we’re on a mission to get you this money back from the government.”
Already, he said, Flexport has been able to generate $700 million in refunds for its customers on duty drawbacks. The company pulls all the data together, formats it for CBP, builds algorithms to match all the imports with their corresponding exports, and once those are connected in the correct quantities, the refunds come in. “This is a big deal,” Petersen said.
The company also launched its Flexport Detention and Demurrage Defender this month, which gives customers a centralized place to view all incoming containers, complete with deadlines and assignments of who needs to do what to get the container out of the port on time. It also includes an estimator that shows when companies will owe what amount of duty.
“Today, the number one cause of demurrage at Flexport is inability to get an appointment at a customer’s warehouse to deliver the container, and so we’ve built a really nice module for those warehouses to manage these appointments, a calendar view to help you see labor planning and dock planning, nice process for creating those appointments, making it easy. Combined, these two pieces of technology are going to just transform the way that containers are picked up at the port and delivered to warehouses,” Petersen said. “Sometimes, just putting the money front and center…will help you wake up and realize, ‘we’ve got to solve this problem.’”
Flexport’s aim is to build a command center to put companies in control of their supply chains, and it’s doing so with a team of missionaries as opposed to mercenaries, as Petersen noted in a discussion on the topic during a recent TBPN podcast. While people in its internal team are staying put despite the bad tariff news they often wake to, clients did temporarily change import behavior when U.S. tariffs on China hit record levels.
“The last time we had duties at this level back in April and May, we saw our volumes from China and the U.S. go down by 60 percent,” he said. “That lasted for six weeks until the tariffs went down and they came roaring back.”
Asked whether the industry is landing anywhere closer to certainty where tariffs are concerned, the response was as uncertain as the situation itself.
“It started to feel like things were calming down until the Trump Administration going after India kind of set off [thinking that] maybe things aren’t as stable if a negotiation can just quickly spiral on a country like that,” Petersen said. “Our view is that anything above 60 percent duty is going to be at an embargo level where almost all trade stops, so we’re well above that [with China] right now. I don’t think that’s where the administration wants this to land, they’d probably like it to be a little bit below the embargo level and make it a ratchet where they can put it above the embargo level when they don’t do what they want.
“I wish we could say we had the long-term visibility,” he said. “We’re definitely not panicking on it.”
