Caspian, an AI trade advisory and compliance platform, today announced the acquisition of Trade-IQ, a trade advisory firm founded by trade compliance veteran Shannon Bryant. Bryant joins Caspian as Vice President of Trade Advisory. In parallel, the company introduced two new products that extend its platform across the full duty lifecycle: Trade Audit and a Tariff Calculator. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Caspian was founded on a single observation: American importers are owed billions of dollars in duty refunds, and the overwhelming majority never claim them, because no trade operating platform existed to capture what is theirs. Duty drawback, a refund mechanism established in United States trade law in 1789, has long been accessible in practice only to large enterprises with dedicated trade counsel and six-figure consulting retainers. Caspian automated that process. The acquisition of Trade-IQ marks the company’s expansion beyond recovery into a single trade operating platform that manages import duty across its entire lifecycle: recover, audit, optimize, and advise.
The announcement follows a period of rapid growth. In its first 15 months operating on its own United States customs broker license and Automated Broker Interface (ABI) connection, Caspian has filed more than $40 million in duty refunds, processed more than three million trade documents, and built product catalogs covering more than two million unique items for more than 200 merchants. The company estimates that over $100 billion in tariff refunds remain recoverable across the United States import and export economy, with roughly 95 percent of eligible companies never filing.
A platform for the full duty lifecycle
The acquisition and product launches reflect a broader strategy. Where most providers address one part of an importer’s duty obligations, Caspian is building a unified system that addresses all of them. Caspian already files duty drawback, Post-Summary Corrections, protests, and classifications.
Tariff Calculator. Now available to all platform users, the Tariff Calculator returns a complete, customs-style duty determination in under a second from an HTS classification, country of origin, entry date, and shipment value. It resolves the base rate, every applicable trade remedy and emergency authority, fees, and controlling Chapter 99 provisions in force on the entry date, and traces each line to its governing authority, a fully auditable, source-cited calculation rather than an opaque estimate. The rate logic is reconciled against regulatory change twice daily and validated by licensed customs brokers before publication, serving importers modeling landed cost and brokers preparing entries with equal precision.
Trade Audit. Trade Audit applies the same engine across a company’s entire customs footprint to surface duty errors before and after entry. Connected to a company’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) account and more than 80 integrated systems, it reviews five or more years of historical entries and screens incoming shipments before filing – flagging misclassification, valuation errors, unclaimed trade-agreement preferences, exclusion eligibility, country-of-origin discrepancies, and recoverable drawback, prioritized by liquidation deadline. Licensed customs brokers validate every finding before Caspian files the appropriate remedy with CBP, from Post-Summary Corrections and protests to petitions and prior disclosures. The result is a single, continuous view of duty exposure that prevents overpayment at the border and recovers it where it has already occurred.
Leadership
Shannon Bryant founded Trade-IQ to bring enterprise-grade trade advisory to mid-market importers. She previously held trade compliance leadership roles at Harley-Davidson and brings over 15 years of experience in customs classification, valuation, and duty strategy. As Vice President of Trade Advisory, Bryant will lead Caspian’s advisory practice and shape the company’s expansion into duty optimization and strategic advisory services.
Executive commentary
Justin Sherlock, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Caspian:
“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.”
Shannon Bryant, Vice President of Trade Advisory at 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.”
Nicolas de Ory, Software Engineer 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.”
About Caspian
Caspian is an AI trade advisory and compliance platform that recovers, audits, optimizes, and advises on import duty. It pairs licensed trade advisors with software that connects to a company’s customs data across more than 80 integrations, audits customs entries, recovers overpaid duty, and keeps importers compliant as policy shifts. Caspian is SOC 2 Type II certified and a certified ABI service center with US Customs & Border Protection. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and was founded in 2024. For more information, visit https://meetcaspian.com.
About Trade-IQ
Trade-IQ is a trade advisory firm specializing in customs classification, valuation, and duty strategy for mid-market importers. Founded by Shannon Bryant, Trade-IQ has been acquired by Caspian.
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