Caspian announced that it has acquired Trade-IQ, a trade advisory firm founded by trade compliance veteran Shannon Bryant.
Caspian is an AI trade advisory and compliance platform focused on helping importers recover, audit, optimize, and manage import duty. The acquisition expands the company from duty recovery into a broader full-lifecycle trade advisory platform.
As part of the transaction, Bryant has joined Caspian as Vice President of Trade Advisory. She will lead Caspian’s advisory practice and help guide the company’s expansion into duty optimization and strategic advisory services.
Bryant founded Trade-IQ to bring enterprise-grade trade advisory services to mid-market importers. She previously held trade compliance leadership roles at Harley-Davidson and brings more than 15 years of experience across customs classification, valuation, and duty strategy.
Caspian said the acquisition comes as many American importers remain unable to recover duty refunds they may be owed because traditional trade advisory and compliance services are often costly, manual, and difficult to access. The company said duty drawback, a refund mechanism established in U.S. trade law in 1789, has historically been more accessible to large enterprises with dedicated trade counsel and expensive consulting relationships.
Caspian has automated parts of that process. In its first 15 months operating on its own U.S. customs broker license and Automated Broker Interface connection, the company said it filed more than $40 million in duty refund claims, processed more than 3 million trade documents, and built product catalogs covering more than 2 million unique items for more than 200 merchants.
The company estimates that more than $100 billion in tariff refunds remain recoverable across the U.S. import and export economy, with about 95% of eligible companies never filing.
Alongside the acquisition, Caspian introduced two new products: Trade Audit and Tariff Calculator.
Tariff Calculator is available to all platform users and provides a customs-style duty determination from an HTS classification, country of origin, entry date, and shipment value. The tool resolves the base rate, applicable trade remedies, emergency authorities, fees, and Chapter 99 provisions in force on the entry date. Caspian said the product provides auditable, source-cited calculations rather than opaque estimates.
Trade Audit applies Caspian’s engine across a company’s customs footprint to identify duty errors before and after entry. Connected to a company’s Automated Commercial Environment account and more than 80 integrated systems, Trade Audit can review five or more years of historical entries and screen incoming shipments before filing.
The product flags issues such as misclassification, valuation errors, unclaimed trade-agreement preferences, exclusion eligibility, country-of-origin discrepancies, and recoverable drawback. Licensed customs brokers validate findings before Caspian files remedies with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including Post-Summary Corrections, protests, petitions, and prior disclosures.
Caspian said these launches extend its platform into a unified system for managing the full duty lifecycle, including recovery, audit, optimization, and advisory services.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
KEY QUOTES:
“Duty recovery was always the entry point to a larger problem: importers lack a single, trusted system for managing duty across its entire lifecycle. Acquiring Trade-IQ and welcoming Shannon Bryant closes that gap. Her expertise, paired with our platform, makes Caspian a full-service partner.”
Justin Sherlock, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Caspian
“I built Trade-IQ because mid-market importers were underserved by an industry that reserved real trade advisory for the largest enterprises. Caspian built the technology I always wished I had: a platform that audits entries, classifies products, and quantifies exposure at a scale no advisory team could match by hand. I joined to bring that to every importer, not just the Fortune 500.”
Shannon Bryant, Vice President of Trade Advisory at Caspian
“Tariff calculator is not a lookup table. It is a graph: thousands of rules, exclusions, and effective dates that change constantly and interact in ways that are easy to get wrong. We modeled that graph, then put agentic AI on top, agents that cite CBP notifications and customs documents, pull the details that matter, and resolve every node in the right order, for any entry. That is the hard problem, and it is the foundation under everything we ship.”
Nicolas de Ory, Software Engineer at Caspian
