Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- Tarifflo, a Utah-based startup, won $20,000 at the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge.
- The company offers an AI platform automating international trade documentation processes.
- CEO Bryce Judy said the company aims to streamline trade compliance amid current global trade uncertainties.
SALT LAKE CITY — Today's world trade landscape is in flux with the Trump administration considering tariffs and other regualtions that would impact an incredibly wide range of trade partners and goods.
While this makes it much more difficult for companies to manage supply chains, it also opens the door for innovation — and Utah-based Tarifflo appears ready to step through.
Tarriflo, a student startup from Utah State University, won the $20,000 grand prize at Saturday's Tim Draper Utah Entrepreneur Challenge hosted by the University of Utah's Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute.
The startup offers a platform powered by artificial intelligence that automates international trade documentation, outperforming traditional and competing software solutions, said Bryce Judy, the company's CEO and co-founder.
"Imagine you're an e-commerce company, or you're a manufacturing company, and you're shipping goods to the United States. Right now, in order to clear your goods through customs ... there's a long process to it," Judy explained. "A specific part of that is you have to classify the goods to get the tariff rates for it. That entails referencing hundreds of thousands of documents on the government site, navigating those and figuring out which tariff code you should assign to it, and that will determine your tariff rate, (and) any regulatory compliance documents that you need to fill out ... before you can import it."
Basically, it's an extremely tedious and expensive process — especially for large-scale companies that move a lot of goods to a lot of different markets. Judy said that's especially true when combined with changes in tariff regulation and the "trade war landscape that we're in right now," supply chain management is harder than ever.
But Judy and Tarifflo have a solution.
The AI-driven technology uses product information and generates detailed documents, including comprehensive references to customs rulings and regulations. It also offers tariff-rate management and possesses a large trade-compliance database covering nontariff measures, free-trade agreements, country-specific harmonized tariff schedule codes and indirect taxes.
"Tarifflo uses AI to do what you would've had to pay an entire team to do. What used to take hours and days to fill out documentation, we can do in several minutes," Judy said. "We can do it real-time, we can do it more accurate, and that's all just using these AI models that we built."
The idea came to Judy, he said, when he enrolled at Utah State University and met his co-founder at a coding competition. At the time, Judy was already working in trade customs and compliance at KPMG's Salt Lake office.
"We had come up with this idea of, 'What if we could automate what my entire team was doing at KPMG?'" Judy said.
When Judy's senior year rolled around, he met with a former boss and showed him what he'd been building.
"His reaction to that kind of told me we were onto something there, that maybe we should go all-in," Judy said. "At that point, I quit my job. I wasn't in school, so I was just full-time on this. We just started building full-time ... and here we are."
Fast forward less than a year, and Tarifflo has $20,000 to inject into a company that has already had publicly traded companies signing on to use its platform since February.
Judy noted that Tarifflo is also starting to work with freight brokers and customs brokerage firms.
Moving forward, Judy anticipates a lot of work centered on navigating the regulation changes currently impacting the trade world.
"We want to be the one-stop shop for anything trade compliance related, supply chain management and even looking at, you know, going into freight brokerage," Judy said.
