Altana is expanding its supply chain mapping and compliance solution with the acquisition of Cervo AI, a startup that automates customs paperwork.
The deal comes as tariffs and volatile trade policies complicate customs compliance for importers and logistics providers.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Altana said the acquisition was a cash-and-stock deal that could exceed more than $100 million if Cervo reaches certain performance milestones.
Altana’s solution pulls together shipment records, public trade data and other information companies submit about their own suppliers to trace the origin of a product’s materials. Once it knows what a product is and where it’s really from, its AI can automatically classify the goods, determine country of origin, calculate duties and flag compliance issues, turning work that once required manual research into an automated lookup.
With the Cervo acquisition, Altana aims to complement its core product with a platform that will automatically write the customs paperwork needed to clear a shipment.
“We built Cervo to take the most painful, manual work off customs brokers’ desks,” said Thomas Jiang, co-founder and co-CEO of Cervo AI, in a statement. “Joining Altana gives us the opportunity to bring that vision to the world’s largest logistics providers.”
Customs brokerage is typically a manual process, with licensed professionals often classifying goods, determining country of origin, calculating duties owed, checking free trade program eligibility and securing permits required by government agencies. These customs brokers end up using this data to write the legal filings that clear the shipment.
“Altana is on a mission to fix globalization by re-architecting global trade—building an AI network for trusted trade that connects importers, suppliers, logistics providers and governments,” said Evan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Altana, in a statement. “With the acquisition of Cervo, our logistics customers can now run and scale their brokerages on a single end-to-end agentic system—from the moment goods are classified to the moment the entry clears. That’s what trusted trade at scale looks like.”
Altana says eight of the largest 10 logistics providers including Maersk are customers.
Customs and trade compliance have played a significant role in the Altana offering, with the company working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) since 2022 to help enforce trade compliance laws.
In one example, the government agency has been using the platform to support enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), empowering more than 2,000 CBP agents to pinpoint goods with forced labor exposure across multi-tier value chains.
The CBP’s job has only gotten more hectic as U.S. trade policies shift, not only with the introduction of various tariffs on foreign goods, but the scrapping of the duty-free de minimis trade provision for shipments valued at lower than $800. The agency has handled more than 63 million entry summaries for the current fiscal year that ends in September. That volume is already 27 percent higher than all of last year and up 65 percent from two years ago.
Beyond its CBP partnership, Altana collaborates with companies across the supply chain, including Maersk, L.L. Bean, Skims and Avery Dennison among others.
Altana recently expanded its partnership with Maersk with the launch of a digital product passport for goods moving within the ocean carrier’s Gemini Cooperation shipping alliance with Hapag-Lloyd. These product passports are attached to goods before they are ship and are recognized by customs authorities across 12 key international ports that handle 70 percent of global trade.
The companies describe the technology as analogous to Global Entry for international travelers, in that pre-verified goods move through compliance checks faster because customs isn’t starting a full risk review every time.
With the passport manager, customs authorities across the Gemini Cooperation’s trade lanes can communicate with importers on shipment status and make risk and compliance determinations using Altana’s agentic recommendations.
Due to the system’s “federated data model,” Maersk can share a product’s passport with sovereign governments without their underlying data ever leaving their own secure environment.
