Keeping up with U.S. tariff changes and manual data entry has long been a time-consuming burden for freight forwarders and customs brokers. Jay Edlin, co-founder and CEO of Wove, says the company's AI-powered orchestration platform is changing that equation — from ingesting 431-page federal notices in about an hour to processing 2,000-line commercial invoices into CargoWise in roughly 30 seconds.

Edlin spoke with FreightWaves during a visit to Chattanooga, his first return since attending the 2022 F3 conference. He used the appearance to detail how the largely bootstrapped company has grown its annual recurring revenue sevenfold over the past year.

What Wove Does

Edlin described Wove as an "agentic orchestration platform for global trade." The company is purely a technology provider — not a freight forwarder or customs broker — and serves two distinct customer segments. The first comprises logistics service providers, primarily freight forwarders and customs brokers on the international side. The second, more recent segment is shippers, reached through the company's tariff intelligence product.

Wove's core automation platform handles shipment registration, customs entry writing, and one-off quote creation inside CargoWise, a widely used transportation management system developed by WiseTech Global and relied on by thousands of logistics companies worldwide. The value proposition centers on cost and time savings, which Edlin said also translates to revenue generation.

"If you're using us to automate quote creation — one-off quote creation into CargoWise — that's work that generally can take a long time, especially if you are having to request additional information from your customer or request a carrier rate," Edlin said. "We can do that completely autonomously, which allows you to quote much faster. And in this business, if you quote faster, you're probably going to win the business."

A key use case involves freight forwarders handling large packing lists or commercial invoices with as many as 2,000 line items. Before implementing Wove, customers processed these entirely by hand, manually reviewing each line and entering data into their TMS. Wove completes the same task in approximately 30 seconds — a change Edlin characterized as a massive process improvement.

The Free Tariff Calculator

Wove's free tariff calculator, available at tariffs.wove.com, grew out of a weekend project during the holiday season late last year. The impetus came when a competitor — which Edlin noted is also a customs broker — restricted access to its own free tariff tool. Wove, which is not a customs broker, decided to build an alternative.

"We just decided to spend the weekend building out an MVP first iteration of our tariff calculator," Edlin said. "We had no idea what was going to happen, but within a few months we had thousands of people using it every single week, and that's only grown from there."

The calculator has since evolved into a premium tier and an API licensing business, all developed with what Edlin described as essentially zero customer acquisition cost. The tool serves as a lead generation channel, driving inbound interest for Wove's broader automation platform.

FreightWaves noted a parallel with Motive, formerly known as Keep Trucking, which gained traction by offering free electronic logging devices ahead of the December 2017 federal ELD mandate that required commercial motor carriers to electronically record drivers' hours of service, attracting hundreds of thousands of trucks before building a larger commercial business.

Ingesting the Harmonized Tariff Schedule

Wove's ingestion engine was originally built to process unstructured data such as commercial invoices and packing lists. The company repurposed that same technology for the U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule, the comprehensive classification system maintained by the U.S. International Trade Commission that determines duty rates for imported goods, which Edlin described as "completely massive."

"The Federal Register notice from last week for the new Section 301 tariffs, which came out about 12 hours before they went into effect, was 431 pages long," Edlin said. Section 301 refers to the trade law provision under which the U.S. imposes tariffs on goods from countries found to engage in unfair trade practices, with duties currently applied to billions of dollars in Chinese imports. "That takes many, many hours for even a licensed customs broker to read through and start to interpret. With the technology that we have under the hood of our tariff engine, we were able to understand and ingest the 431-page notice in about an hour."

Edlin said Wove was the first platform in the world to have the updated tariff data ready, allowing customs brokers and importers to immediately calculate their new landed costs.

Since last year, the company has ingested more than 45 HTS revisions, building a database of approximately 3.2 million rules covering Chapter 99 exclusions, inclusions, and effective dates. Chapter 99 of the HTS is where the U.S. government codifies temporary and provisional tariff measures, including trade remedies, duty suspensions, and product-specific exclusions. Edlin referred to the system as a "tariff time machine," noting that companies use Wove's API to conduct historical tariff audits for internal purposes — a use case the company had not anticipated even a few months prior.

The process is highly automated. When a new Federal Register notice is published, Wove receives a Slack notification that triggers an AI agent to ingest and understand the changes. Licensed customs broker partners review the output, and corrections are turned around in a matter of minutes.

White-Label Data and Product Catalog

Beyond the free calculator, Wove white-labels its tariff data for customs brokers that want a branded calculator on their own websites. Edlin confirmed that any customs brokerage — including Chattanooga-based STEAM — could have a co-branded version powered by Wove's data.

The company also offers a product catalog module that allows importers to bulk-upload SKU spreadsheets and run real-time tariff exposure simulations. Users can model different scenarios and conduct historical analyses across their entire product catalogs.

Fortune 500 companies and academic researchers are among the current users of Wove's tariff data, Edlin said. The breadth of adoption has surprised the team.

The Flexport Comparison

When asked about competitors, Edlin referenced Flexport, which offers its own tariff calculator but restricts regular use to Flexport customers. Edlin clarified that Flexport is not a competitor to Wove in the broader sense, since Wove is neither a forwarder nor a customs broker. He noted that Flexport does not appear to be monetizing its calculator directly.

Wove's calculator, by contrast, is freely available to anyone, including logistics service providers that may compete with Flexport.

AI and the Future of Customs Brokerage

On the question of whether AI tools such as Claude or Codex could eventually replace customs brokers entirely — a narrative that some venture capitalists have promoted — Edlin was skeptical.

"I don't believe that just adopting Claude Code or Codex replaces a customs broker," he said. "The people on the ground that do this important work day in and day out — they do really important work. And we believe that work should not be entering line items from a packing list or an invoice into a TMS. It should be helping your customers interpret the latest Chapter 99 rules or the latest tariff update."

FreightWaves drew a comparison to the real estate industry, where individuals have had the ability to list homes online for years yet continue to rely on agents. Edlin agreed, citing the principle of comparative advantage and the value of outsourcing complex, detail-heavy work to experts.

Edlin noted that some importers have begun using Wove's tools — including the tariff time machine and real-time tariff data — to handle more compliance work in-house, potentially reducing what they pay customs brokers. However, FreightWaves observed that this approach likely only makes sense at significant scale, such as a billion-dollar importer, and may not be practical for mid-sized companies.

Funding and Growth

Wove has raised less than $500,000 to date and remains largely bootstrapped. Edlin declined to disclose absolute ARR figures but confirmed the sevenfold growth over the past year.

"What we want to do with the business is just continue to build a best-in-class product and serve this industry that we've come to really appreciate and love," Edlin said. "Whether that means turning this into a lifestyle business where we can do this for the next 20 years, or we ultimately find an acquirer or some sort of exit path — I think those conversations will come in time."

He acknowledged that the company spent a couple of years getting from zero to one, but said the past year has been transformative. "I'm finally having fun because we're focused on building the business and not just thinking about survival."

USMCA and North American Trade

Asked about the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Edlin said Wove views trade policy through the lens of its tariff data rather than as a policy expert. He noted that the current administration originally negotiated the USMCA during its first term, and that Canada and Mexico remain two of the largest U.S. trade partners.

"I believe in a rising tide lifts all boats," Edlin said. "I think we are better off as a country when both Canada and Mexico are stronger."

FreightWaves observed that Mexico has been more proactive in trade negotiations under its current administration, while Canada has taken a different posture. Edlin agreed with that characterization.

Regardless of policy direction, Edlin emphasized that whenever changes to USMCA or other trade agreements occur, Wove will be able to update its tracker and tariff data in real time.

Accessing Wove

The free tariff calculator is available at tariffs.wove.com, and more information about the company is available at wove.com. Edlin is also active on X.

Source: FreightWaves