Why We Invested in Trade Lab: Building an AI-Native Customs Brokerage

Every so often, we meet a founder who makes us willing to invest earlier than we typically would. Someone who has demonstrated a rare pattern of doing hard things long before starting a company.

Kevin Power is one of those founders.

Trade Lab is building an AI-native customs brokerage platform that automates one of the largest and least modernized functions in global trade. Every product crossing a border must be classified, duty-rated, and cleared through customs, yet much of the industry still runs on spreadsheets, emails, and decades-old workflows. In the U.S. alone, the average customs broker is over 55, and much of the industry is approaching a generational transition.

It’s a massive market hiding in plain sight.

But while the opportunity initially drew us in, what ultimately convinced us to invest was Kevin.

The Founder Conviction Behind Trade Lab

Great founders don’t just accumulate impressive experiences. They have a habit of putting themselves in difficult environments and coming out stronger on the other side.

Kevin has done that throughout his career.

Over nearly a decade, he has worked across industrial operations, military leadership, AI, and global trade. He managed import and export operations at HF Sinclair, served as an Engineer Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, helped train large language models at Scale AI, and discovered firsthand just how outdated customs brokerage remains.

What impressed us wasn’t the résumé itself. It was the intentionality behind it.

When Kevin became convinced that supply chain and global trade would define the next chapter of his career, he didn’t wait for the perfect opportunity. He created one. He completed MIT’s MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management while working full time, earned admission to MIT’s highly selective blended master’s program, and moved to Cambridge to immerse himself in one of the world’s best supply chain ecosystems, all while continuing to build what would become Trade Lab.

That same drive showed up everywhere we looked. Kevin built the initial product himself, won both OpenAI’s GPT Agent Tooling Challenge and Google’s Model Training Challenge, and developed a level of technical depth that’s unusual even among AI founders. More importantly, he pairs that technical ability with genuine empathy for the customer because he has lived the problem firsthand.

Throughout our diligence, we kept hearing the same thing from people who knew him: Kevin is the kind of founder people want to see win. The best founders don’t just attract talent, customers, and investors because of what they’ve built. They attract them because people believe in where they’re going.

Rebuilding Customs Brokerage With AI

Customs brokerage isn’t a market that gets much attention, but it should.

Every cross-border shipment requires product classification, duty calculations, compliance checks, and customs filings. The work is highly specialized, heavily regulated, and still performed largely through manual processes.

Trade Lab believes AI can fundamentally change that.

Its customs brokerage software allows importers to classify products, calculate duties, identify compliance risks, and eventually automate customs filings in seconds instead of hours. Beyond brokerage, Trade Lab is building tools for tariff engineering and duty optimization, helping customers reduce costs while remaining compliant.

As global trade becomes more complex, with shifting tariffs, evolving regulations, and increasingly fragmented supply chains, we believe software will become an essential layer of trade infrastructure.

Trade Lab is building that layer.

Why AI-Native Customs Brokerage, Why Now

Large language models, growing trade complexity, and an aging customs workforce have created a unique window for change.

For decades, customs expertise has lived primarily inside people’s heads. Today, AI makes it possible to capture that expertise, scale it, and deliver it instantly through software. We believe that changes the speed, scalability, and economics of customs brokerage entirely.

Why Bonfire Invested in Trade Lab

The best venture investments often begin with a simple belief: exceptional founders have a way of solving problems that don’t yet have obvious answers.

We believe Kevin is one of those founders.

The customs brokerage market is large, painfully inefficient, and increasingly important to the global economy. The technology is arriving at exactly the right moment. And Kevin combines the technical talent, domain expertise, and sheer determination that we believe category-defining companies require.

We believe Trade Lab has the potential to become the infrastructure layer for AI-powered global trade, and we’re excited to be on that journey from the very beginning.