The news: Altana, a supply chain intelligence company, acquired Cervo AI, a startup that uses AI to draft customs filings. The deal was announced this week. Terms were not disclosed.
Altana already maps global supply chains from trade data. It screens shipments for classification, origin, and forced labor or sanctions risk. Cervo handles the next step: writing the actual customs entry. Altana calls the combined product the first fully agentic customs brokerage.
What Cervo does: A customs entry is the filing an importer submits to clear goods through a border. Preparing one is manual work. A broker reads the incoming paperwork, pulls out shipment details, assigns tariff codes, and keys it all into a filing system.
Cervo’s AI drafts the filing. It reads unstructured inputs like emails, PDFs, and EDI messages, then produces a submission-ready entry, including HTS tariff codes and the required screenings for agencies like the FDA and EPA. It plugs into the filing systems brokers already run, such as CargoWise.
Cervo says brokers can process five times more entries without adding staff. One customer reported cutting entry time about 75%. Those are company figures.
The fit: Altana’s existing system decides what a shipment is and what rules apply to it. Cervo turns that into the filed document. “From the moment goods are classified to the moment the entry clears,” is how Altana CEO Evan Smith described the combined workflow.
A licensed broker still reviews and certifies each entry, so this drafts the paperwork rather than replacing the broker.
Why now: Customs work is getting harder at the same time. Four things are converging:
The de minimis exemption is gone
Section 338 tariffs on Canada are in
USMCA is being renegotiated
The EU and China are tightening traceability rules
Altana puts the customs brokerage market at about $45 billion and still mostly manual.
The pattern: Agentic AI is moving from advice to action across the industry, and companies are taking different routes to get there. Flexport built its own customs filing tools in-house. Nuvocargo bought a startup to expand its capabilities. Altana bought outright.
On the same day this deal was announced, J.B. Hunt spun out Overroute to do something similar in freight execution.
