Tariffs can feel like a fixed cost of doing business, especially for companies that import products, components, materials, or finished goods. The invoice comes in, the duty is paid, and the business moves on to the next shipment. But in many cases, that is not the end of the story.
For businesses that later export goods, use imported materials in products that leave the country, or move inventory through complex global supply chains, some of those paid duties may be recoverable through a process known as duty drawback. The problem is that the refund process has often been too slow, too technical, and too paperwork-heavy for many companies to pursue properly.
That is the gap Justin Sherlock is working to close with Caspian. As the co-founder and CEO of Caspian, Sherlock is building an AI-native trade advisory platform focused on helping businesses identify, manage, and recover duty refunds that may otherwise remain unclaimed. His work sits at the meeting point of global trade, customs compliance, finance, logistics, and artificial intelligence.
Caspian is not trying to solve a small inconvenience. It is going after a hidden financial problem that affects importers, exporters, retailers, manufacturers, and fast-growing brands. When duty refunds are missed, companies leave cash trapped in a system they may not fully understand. Sherlock’s achievement is in turning that complex, often overlooked process into something more visible, more manageable, and more useful for modern business teams.
Who is Justin Sherlock
Justin Sherlock is a founder with a background that fits the problem Caspian is built to solve. Before Caspian, he gained experience in finance, logistics, and global trade, including work connected to Flexport, a company known for bringing technology into freight forwarding and supply chain operations.
That background matters because duty drawback is not just a software problem. It is also a customs problem, a finance problem, a data problem, and an operations problem. Businesses need more than a dashboard. They need a system that can understand the rules, read messy trade data, support compliance, and help teams make better decisions.
Sherlock’s path shows why Caspian is being built around both technology and trade expertise. Many founders talk about using AI to remove friction from old industries, but the most useful products usually come from people who understand the details of the industry they are trying to improve. In global trade, those details matter. A small documentation issue, a missing record, or a misunderstood eligibility rule can change whether a company can file a claim with confidence.
With Caspian, Sherlock is applying that experience to a problem many companies know exists but have struggled to solve in a practical way.
What Caspian does
Caspian is an AI-native trade advisory platform that focuses on duty drawback and tariff refund processing. In simple terms, it helps companies find opportunities to recover import duties that may be refundable under certain trade conditions.
Duty drawback can apply when imported goods are later exported, destroyed, or used in products that are exported. The idea is straightforward, but the process behind it is not. Companies often need to connect import records, export records, product data, inventory movement, customs documents, and compliance details. For businesses with thousands of shipments, multiple suppliers, and changing tariff exposure, that becomes difficult quickly.
Caspian’s role is to make that process easier to manage. The platform is designed to analyze shipping and inventory data, identify potential refund opportunities, and support duty recovery workflows. Instead of relying only on slow manual reviews, Caspian uses AI and software to help businesses understand where recoverable value may exist.
This is where Sherlock’s approach becomes important. He is not positioning Caspian as a generic AI tool. The company is built for a specific and costly trade problem. That makes the value easier to understand for the businesses that need it most. If a company has paid duties and may be eligible for refunds, Caspian gives that company a clearer way to find and pursue those refunds.
Why unclaimed duty refunds are such a big problem
Unclaimed duty refunds are a quiet problem. They do not always show up as a dramatic loss on a financial statement. They often sit hidden inside the normal cost of importing goods. A company pays customs duties, records the expense, and keeps operating.
But over time, missed refunds can affect margins, cash flow, and planning. For an importer dealing with thin margins, even a small percentage of recoverable duties can matter. For larger businesses with high shipment volume, the amount can be much more meaningful.
One reason so many refunds go unclaimed is that the process can feel intimidating. Trade compliance teams may already be stretched. Finance teams may not have full visibility into customs records. Operations teams may store shipping and inventory data in different systems. A company might know it has paid duties, but still struggle to prove eligibility in a way that supports a proper drawback claim.
The older process also tends to be slow and fragmented. Businesses may need to gather documents from customs brokers, freight forwarders, suppliers, warehouses, finance systems, and internal operations teams. Once those records are collected, someone has to match them correctly, check the rules, prepare the claim, and maintain compliance support.
For many companies, the work feels too heavy compared to the expected return. That is exactly why a modern platform like Caspian can be valuable. It changes the question from “Is this worth the manual effort?” to “How much recoverable value can we find if the data is handled more intelligently?”
How Justin Sherlock is positioning Caspian differently
Justin Sherlock is positioning Caspian as more than a software layer. The company operates in a space where trust, compliance, and domain knowledge are essential. Customs work is regulated, and businesses cannot afford careless automation when government filings and financial claims are involved.
That is why Caspian’s positioning is important. The company brings together trade advisory, customs knowledge, and AI-supported workflows. This blend helps it stand apart from basic automation tools that may not fully understand the complexity of duty drawback.
Sherlock’s approach recognizes that customers want speed, but they also need confidence. A refund opportunity is only useful if it can be supported with the right documentation and handled in a compliant way. Businesses do not want to chase refunds if the process creates more risk than value.
Caspian’s model gives businesses a more structured path. It can help them see where refund opportunities exist, understand the data behind those opportunities, and move through the claim process with more clarity. That is a strong achievement because it takes a process that has traditionally depended on manual work and turns it into something more scalable.
Making duty drawback easier for more businesses
For a long time, duty drawback has been easier for large enterprises to pursue than smaller or mid-sized companies. Big companies may have internal trade teams, outside advisors, and the resources to manage complex claims. Smaller businesses often do not.
That creates an uneven playing field. A growing ecommerce brand, manufacturer, or product company may be paying meaningful duties, but still lack the internal structure to recover eligible refunds. Those companies may assume duty drawback is only worth it for large corporations.
Caspian challenges that assumption. By using software and AI to reduce the manual burden, the platform can make duty recovery more approachable. It does not remove the need for compliance, but it can reduce the confusion that keeps companies from starting.
This is one of the clearest parts of Justin Sherlock’s success story. He is taking a specialized trade process and making it more accessible. That kind of work matters because it helps businesses protect margins without needing to become customs experts themselves.
The role of AI in Caspian’s growth
AI is most useful when it is applied to a real problem with messy data, repeated workflows, and high financial stakes. Duty drawback fits that description well.
Trade data is often scattered across different systems. Import information may sit with a customs broker. Export records may sit in a logistics platform. Inventory data may live in an ERP, warehouse system, or spreadsheet. Finance teams may have payment records, but not the operational context. These pieces need to be connected before a company can understand whether it has a strong refund opportunity.
Caspian uses AI to help make sense of that complexity. The goal is not simply to make the process look modern. The goal is to help businesses move from disconnected records to useful insight.
For companies dealing with tariffs, this can be powerful. AI can support the review of large data sets, help identify patterns, and reduce the time spent on repetitive matching work. It can also help teams prioritize where to focus first, which matters when shipment volume is high.
Sherlock’s use of AI is practical rather than flashy. Caspian is not selling AI as a buzzword. It is using AI to solve a specific pain point in global trade. That is why the company’s story feels relevant in a market where many businesses are looking for tools that deliver measurable value.
Why Caspian matters in today’s tariff environment
Tariffs have become a bigger part of business planning. Companies that import goods cannot always treat duties as predictable background costs. Trade policy can shift, sourcing decisions can change, and tariff exposure can become a serious margin issue.
This environment makes Caspian timely. When tariffs rise or become harder to forecast, businesses start looking for ways to reduce, recover, or better manage those costs. Duty drawback is one of the tools that can help, but only when companies have the right systems and records in place.
Caspian also reflects a broader shift in how businesses think about trade compliance. In the past, customs work was often seen mainly as a back-office responsibility. Today, it connects directly to finance, cash flow, pricing, sourcing, and supply chain strategy.
That shift gives Caspian a wider role. The platform is not only helping companies file refund claims. It is helping them understand how trade data can support better financial decisions. For CFOs, supply chain leaders, and operations teams, that visibility can be just as important as the refund itself.
Caspian’s early momentum
Caspian’s early momentum shows that investors and business leaders see real opportunity in modernizing this part of global trade. The company announced seed funding led by Primary Venture Partners, with support from Blank Ventures, as it brought its AI-powered trade advisory platform to market.
Funding alone does not prove long-term success, but it does show confidence in the size of the problem and the strength of Caspian’s approach. Duty recovery is not a trendy consumer feature. It is a practical business need tied to real money, real compliance work, and real operational complexity.
That makes Caspian’s market position interesting. The company is building in an area where customers already feel pain. Importers and exporters understand that tariffs affect their margins. Many also understand that refunds may be available, but they need a better way to find and pursue them.
Sherlock’s advantage is that Caspian is entering the market with a clear problem, a focused product, and a team built around trade experience. In a crowded AI landscape, that focus matters.
What makes Justin Sherlock’s approach successful
Justin Sherlock’s approach stands out because he is not trying to make AI solve everything. He is applying it to one specific area where old processes have created a clear gap between what businesses are owed and what they actually recover.
That focus gives Caspian a strong story. The company is not only improving efficiency. It is helping businesses recover cash that may already belong to them under existing trade rules. That is a message finance and operations leaders can understand quickly.
Another strength is the combination of product thinking and customs knowledge. Trade technology can fail when it ignores the complexity of the real workflow. A clean interface is not enough if the platform cannot handle the documentation, eligibility logic, and compliance expectations behind the scenes.
Caspian appears built with those realities in mind. It brings software into a process that has long depended on manual effort, while still respecting the importance of accuracy and regulatory context.
Sherlock’s success also comes from timing. Businesses are paying closer attention to tariffs, duty exposure, and supply chain resilience. A platform that helps them reclaim overpaid duties and understand trade costs better fits naturally into that conversation.
How Caspian could shape the future of duty drawback
Caspian’s early focus is duty drawback, but the company’s larger opportunity may be broader than refund recovery alone. Once a platform can help businesses connect customs data, inventory movement, tariff exposure, and financial impact, it can become part of a bigger trade intelligence layer.
That could change how companies think about customs work. Instead of seeing duty drawback as a slow claim process that happens after the fact, businesses may start treating it as part of ongoing financial recovery and trade planning.
In that future, companies could use trade data more proactively. They could identify refund opportunities earlier, understand duty exposure before it becomes a margin problem, and build better systems around compliance. Caspian’s work points in that direction.
For Justin Sherlock, the achievement is not only building a platform for today’s duty refund process. It is building the foundation for a smarter way to manage global trade costs. That is why Caspian is worth watching.
Why Justin Sherlock and Caspian are worth watching
Justin Sherlock is building Caspian around a problem that has been hiding in plain sight. Businesses pay import duties every day, but many do not have the systems, time, or expertise to recover refunds they may be eligible to claim.
Caspian brings a modern approach to that problem. By combining AI, trade advisory, customs compliance, and data analysis, the company gives importers and exporters a clearer path to duty recovery. It helps turn complicated customs records into business insight, and it gives finance and supply chain teams a better way to look at tariff costs.
The story of Justin Sherlock and Caspian is a strong example of focused innovation. Instead of chasing a broad AI trend, Sherlock is applying technology to a specific, expensive, and underserved problem. That focus is what makes the company’s work useful, and it is what makes his founder story meaningful.
For businesses dealing with tariff pressure, supply chain complexity, and tighter margins, Caspian offers something practical. It helps them look again at money they may have already paid and ask whether some of it can be recovered.
