Pax

Penny Chen and Chris Le met through Y Combinator's co-founder matching platform and founded Pax in San Francisco in 2024. Chen earned a PhD at MIT and built pricing, forecasting, fulfillment and capacity-planning algorithms at Amazon and Flexport; at Flexport she encountered duty drawback as a real customer pain. Le was a repeat founder and engineer at Amazon, Brex and TikTok, including last-mile supply-chain optimization. They entered YC S24 with a 'TurboTax for import-duty rebates': many importers paid tariffs on goods later exported, destroyed or used in exported manufacturing but could not afford the manual broker/data work needed to claim up to 99% of eligible duties. Pax ingests import entries, export records, inventory and ERP/warehouse data; extracts and normalizes documents; determines the applicable 19 U.S.C. §1313/19 CFR Part 190 provision; builds a multidimensional match graph; simulates legal substitution/manufacturing/unused-merchandise scenarios to maximize recovery; validates documentation and deadlines; creates audit trails; and generates ACE/ABI-compliant filings. An in-house licensed customs broker reviews each claim before submission. The company claims its optimization returns about 15% more than traditional matching approaches and reduces processing time by 99%, while only charging when the client receives a refund. It completed YC's standard $500k financing in 2024 and raised a $4.5m seed led by Initialized Capital in April 2025 with Sancus, Basis Set Ventures, Soma Capital, General Catalyst, Transpose Platform, ZVC1 and Flexport-linked angels, for $5m disclosed total. The product subsequently expanded from duty drawback into a broader AI trade-compliance control tower: import/tariff analytics, continuous audits, reconciliation, inventory/document management, duty mitigation, post-entry compliance, Foreign Trade Zone support and IEEPA Refund Assist. Publicly named enterprise users include Verkada, Glossier, Yamaha, Eastman Kodak, Rave, Plexus, Biocom, Mirion, Fiskars, Syensqo and NCAB Group. YC says Pax has recovered millions of dollars in duties; a 2026 job listing says those enterprises run trade compliance on the platform. Current team evidence suggests roughly 19 employees. The site displays SOC 2 Type II, ABI certification and U.S. licensed customs brokerage. Major risks are incorrect eligibility/matching or filing, CBP audit and penalty exposure, changing tariff/court policy, client data completeness, refund timing and collectability under contingent fees, sensitive supply-chain data, licensed-broker supervision and concentration in U.S. customs law.

Founding story

Chen saw duty drawback's data and optimization burden while working on supply-chain algorithms at Flexport. She and Le met on YC co-founder matching, interviewed importers and built a software-plus-broker model to make a formerly high-minimum service accessible to smaller brands before moving upmarket.

Business model

Technology-enabled customs brokerage and enterprise trade-compliance SaaS, centered on automated duty recovery and compliance operations.

Contingency/success fee on recovered duty with zero upfront cost for drawback; broader enterprise control-tower, audit and integration modules are sales-led with undisclosed contract pricing.

Traction

YC reports millions of dollars in duties recovered. Public customer roster includes 11 named enterprises, and current recruiting materials say Verkada, Glossier, Yamaha and Kodak run trade compliance on Pax. Earlier YC launch material reported roughly $200k in contracts within four weeks, but current revenue/contract scale is not public.

Latest developments

By August 2026 Pax had repositioned as an end-to-end AI trade-compliance control tower, added continuous audits, FTZ/reconciliation/post-entry functions and launched IEEPA Refund Assist/CAPE support following Supreme Court action and emerging CBP filing processes.