ImportGenius
ImportGenius is a Scottsdale, Arizona-based technology company that operates an online platform providing access to detailed global trade data, including import and export shipment records derived from public customs manifests and bills of lading.[1][2] The service aggregates data on billions of shipments, covering the United States and over 15 other countries such as Russia and India, enabling users to search for suppliers, track competitors' activities, and gain insights into international supply chains.[3][4] Founded in 2007 by importers seeking to leverage public trade records for competitive advantage, ImportGenius initially focused on U.S. import data before expanding globally.[5][6] Co-founders include Michael Kanko, who serves as CEO, and Ryan Petersen, who later founded logistics firm Flexport.[7][8] The company processes raw customs data using advanced analytics to deliver actionable intelligence, positioning itself as a key tool for businesses in market research, due diligence, and strategic sourcing.[3] ImportGenius has achieved prominence as a disruptor in trade intelligence by democratizing access to opaque shipping information, which was previously difficult to obtain and analyze.[5] Its database supports over 8 million U.S. businesses and extends to international markets, with features for real-time monitoring and pattern recognition in trade flows.[1] While the platform relies on publicly available data, it enhances usability through search functionalities and visualizations, though users must navigate potential limitations in data completeness due to varying customs reporting standards across jurisdictions.[3]Overview
Company Profile
ImportGenius is a privately held trade intelligence company that collects, organizes, and analyzes global shipping data from bills of lading to deliver insights on import and export activities.[7] The platform provides access to billions of shipment records across more than 24 countries, including granular U.S. customs data encompassing over 258 million import shipments and 5.6 million export shipments, enabling users to track suppliers, monitor competitors, and identify market opportunities.[1] Its services target businesses, researchers, journalists, and policymakers seeking transparency in international trade flows.[7] Founded in 2007 by Michael Kanko, who remains the chief executive officer, the company is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, with supporting offices in Toronto, Canada; Shanghai and Shenzhen, China; and Seoul, South Korea.[7] [9] [10] ImportGenius operates on a subscription model without recorded external funding, emphasizing self-sustained growth through data aggregation and tool development. Early milestones include a 2008 revelation of unreleased Apple product shipments that attracted media coverage and a 2012 collaboration with The New York Times for investigative reporting on trade patterns.[7] In 2025, ImportGenius expanded its offerings with AI-powered tools, such as the Genius Company Profiler for rapid partner assessment, and a dedicated U.S.-Mexico trade dataset to address evolving supply chain needs amid tariff considerations.[7] [1] The company's mission centers on making opaque trade data accessible and actionable, thereby promoting efficiency and fairness in global commerce through technological innovation.[7]Core Mission and Value Proposition
ImportGenius operates with the core mission of empowering businesses and professionals to make informed decisions in international trade by organizing and analyzing vast amounts of scattered shipping and customs data into actionable intelligence. The company achieves this through innovative technology that processes public records from sources such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection, enabling users to access detailed bill of lading information, supplier profiles, and shipment histories. This mission emphasizes transparency in global commerce, transforming opaque data into tools that support growth, risk mitigation, and competitive advantage.[11][7] The value proposition centers on delivering comprehensive trade intelligence that reveals patterns in imports, exports, and supply chains, allowing clients to identify reliable suppliers, monitor competitor activities, and detect market shifts with precision. By aggregating over 2 billion records from more than 24 countries, including daily updates for U.S. data, ImportGenius provides granular insights such as port-level shipments, product classifications, and carrier details, which are otherwise difficult to compile manually. This data-driven approach benefits sectors including logistics, manufacturing, retail, and government agencies, facilitating applications like sourcing optimization, compliance verification, and policy analysis.[1][7] In practice, the platform's offerings, such as customizable dashboards and AI-enhanced profiling tools, democratize access to high-value trade information that has historically favored large enterprises with dedicated research teams. ImportGenius has served over 50,000 customers, representing 20% of Fortune 500 companies, underscoring its role in leveling the informational playing field and driving efficiency in global operations. Users leverage these capabilities to uncover opportunities like new vendor partnerships or counterfeit detection, ultimately reducing reliance on anecdotal intelligence and enhancing strategic foresight.[1][11]History
Founding and Early Development
ImportGenius was founded in 2007 in Scottsdale, Arizona, by Ryan Petersen, his brother David Petersen, and Michael Kanko, who had experience in importing and recognized the untapped value of publicly available trade data buried in government records.[2][12] The founders aimed to aggregate and make searchable the shipping manifests from U.S. Customs and other sources, which were previously difficult to access and analyze, enabling businesses to track competitors' import activities, suppliers, and market trends.[7][5] The platform launched in late 2007, initially focusing on U.S. import records updated daily through licensed data feeds, with users able to search by company, product, origin, and cargo details for a subscription fee starting at $99 per month.[5] Early adopters were primarily small importers and exporters seeking competitive intelligence, such as identifying rivals' suppliers or verifying shipment volumes, which provided a disruptive edge in opaque global trade networks.[5] By mid-2008, the service had gained media attention for exposing high-profile shipments, including details on Apple's iPhone imports, demonstrating the platform's potential to reveal otherwise hidden supply chain insights.[5]Growth and Product Evolution
ImportGenius experienced rapid early adoption following its 2007 founding, with a key milestone in 2008 when analysis of a major Apple shipment from China garnered widespread media attention, highlighting the platform's utility in uncovering hidden supply chain details.[7] This visibility drove initial user growth among importers seeking competitive intelligence from U.S. Customs data. By 2009, the company released trade maps visualizing import/export flows, enhancing analytical capabilities beyond raw bill-of-lading searches.[7] The platform's evolution accelerated in 2011 with expansion into international trade data, shifting from a U.S.-centric tool to a broader global resource covering additional countries' customs records.[7] In 2017, ImportGenius introduced enterprise sales and strategic accounts, tailoring services for larger organizations requiring advanced compliance and logistics insights.[7] Product development continued in 2019 with the launch of Lighthouse, a tool focused on customer insights derived from trade patterns, enabling users to track buyer behaviors and market shifts.[7] Geographic and feature expansions marked further growth, including a 2021 focus on the Korean market as the first country-specific initiative, alongside broader access to Latin American, Indian, Russian, and Ukrainian data.[7] By 2024, the company modernized its data delivery interfaces for improved user experience in querying multi-country shipments.[7] In 2025, ImportGenius integrated AI-powered tools, such as the Genius Company Profiler launched on April 10, which automates company profiling from trade records, and a dedicated U.S.-Mexico trade dataset to address nearshoring trends.[13][7] On June 18, 2025, the company rolled out expanded Pro plans, including Global Pro for multi-country access, American Pro, and North American Pro, incorporating features like HS code filtering, custom reports, and enhanced supplier discovery to support mid-market expansion without enterprise-level costs.[14] These updates reflect a progression from basic shipment tracking to sophisticated, AI-augmented intelligence for supply chain optimization, with coverage now spanning billions of records across dozens of countries.[1]Recent Expansions and Innovations
In 2025, ImportGenius expanded its global trade data coverage by launching new datasets for Vietnam, Pakistan, and Cameroon on July 30, enabling users to access import/export records from these markets for supplier sourcing and competitive intelligence.[15] The company announced plans to further extend Southeast Asian coverage in Q3 2025 with datasets for Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, building on its existing databases that already encompass billions of shipment records worldwide.[15] On April 10, 2025, ImportGenius introduced Genius Company Profiler, an AI-driven tool that analyzes trade data to generate detailed company profiles, including shipment patterns, key partners, and market trends, aimed at enhancing user decision-making in procurement and sales.[13] This was followed by the August 7 rollout of an AI-powered HS code search feature for U.S. maritime imports, which automates classification, filtering, and querying of tariff codes to improve accuracy and efficiency in trade analysis.[16] Earlier in the year, ImportGenius broadened access to its advanced analytics through new Global Pro subscription plans, providing non-enterprise users with enhanced tools for supplier discovery, customer intelligence, and export data without premium pricing tiers.[14] These developments reflect a strategic focus on AI integration and geographic expansion to address growing demand for real-time, actionable trade insights amid volatile global supply chains.[17]Data Sources and Methodology
Primary Data Collection
ImportGenius primarily collects its data from publicly available customs records and official government filings worldwide, focusing on bills of lading (BOLs) and related shipment manifests submitted to customs authorities.[11] These records are legally required disclosures for international trade, capturing details such as shipper and consignee information, product descriptions, Harmonized System (HS) codes, quantities, weights, and port details.[18] The company aggregates billions of such records, which are obtained through direct relationships with customs agencies, data vendors, and licensing agreements with government and private entities.[3] For U.S. imports, data is sourced directly from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), leveraging Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to access shipping manifests that have been public records for decades.[11] This includes comprehensive BOL data for ocean, air, and land shipments arriving at U.S. ports, with over 301 million records from 6.75 million companies processed since 2008.[18] Updates occur daily, often within minutes of CBP releases, ensuring near-real-time availability of fields like container numbers, carrier names, gross weights, and countries of origin.[18][11] Internationally, collection extends to equivalent customs authorities in over 20 countries, including Mexico, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Turkey, Vietnam, India, and Ukraine, where similar public or licensed trade data is mandated for clearance.[3] Non-U.S. datasets are typically refreshed monthly, drawing from government public records and proprietary sources not always accessible to competitors.[3][11] While maritime shipments form the core (covering all U.S. ports and global ocean freight), the platform also incorporates air and land border data where available from official filings.[11] Following acquisition, raw records undergo cleaning, enrichment, and structuring to standardize formats, resolve inconsistencies (e.g., name variations across filings), and enable searchable analysis, though the primary emphasis remains on unaltered public-source fidelity.[3] All data is described as legitimate public or legally obtained proprietary information, with no reliance on user-submitted or scraped private details.[11]Coverage and Accuracy
ImportGenius aggregates bill of lading data for shipments entering or leaving over 23 countries, including the United States, Mexico, India, Vietnam, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and more recently expanded to include Vietnam, Pakistan, and Cameroon as of July 30, 2025.[19][15] The dataset focuses on granular import and export records at the bill of lading level, sourced from public customs agencies, with comprehensive coverage for U.S. customs manifests covering all importers and exporters.[11][1] This enables tracking of over 8 million U.S. businesses' trade activities, though coverage depth varies by country, with fuller bill of lading details available for major markets like the U.S. and limited aggregated data for others where public records are less detailed.[1] The platform's methodology emphasizes data accuracy through end-to-end governance processes, including verification against original customs filings to ensure consistency and reliability.[3][11] ImportGenius claims "unmatched data accuracy" derived from direct sourcing of official records, distinguishing it from competitors reliant on secondary or incomplete datasets.[16] Independent user feedback on review sites corroborates this, with reports of precise shipment details enabling effective competitor monitoring and supplier identification.[20] However, occasional misclassifications in product categorization or shipment details have occurred due to customs data inconsistencies, leading the company to refine automated processing and manual checks.[21] Overall reliability stems from the public nature of bill of lading records, though accuracy can be affected by errors in original filings or delays in customs reporting, typically updated daily for U.S. data.[22]Products and Features
Core Platform Capabilities
ImportGenius serves as a comprehensive platform for accessing and analyzing global trade data, drawing from billions of shipment records obtained from government customs agencies, public records, and proprietary sources across more than 24 countries.[3] Its core database includes over 258 million import shipments and 5.6 million export shipments, with daily updates for major markets such as U.S. imports to ensure timeliness.[1] Users can perform advanced searches and filter results by criteria including company names, products, origins, destinations, and dates, facilitating targeted inquiries into trade activities.[3] A primary capability involves supplier discovery and profiling, where the platform aggregates detailed records on global suppliers, including company profiles, trading partners, shipment histories, and export volumes.[3] The AI-powered Genius Company Profiler enhances this by improving data accuracy, filling gaps in information, and verifying suppliers through shipping patterns.[1] For competitor monitoring, users track rivals' sourcing strategies, supply chain shifts, and overall trade volumes, enabling identification of market opportunities or risks via built-in analytics.[1] The platform's analytical tools transform raw data into actionable insights, supporting trend visualization, supply chain risk assessment, and generation of executive-ready reports.[3] Features such as customizable alerts notify users of new shipments matching predefined criteria, while AI-driven HS code search adds precision to product classification and compliance checks.[1] Exclusive datasets, including U.S.-Mexico border crossings and Panama Canal transits, provide coverage of hard-to-access trade routes not readily available elsewhere.[3] These capabilities collectively aid in market research, logistics optimization, and enforcement applications by prioritizing empirical trade patterns over anecdotal evidence.[1]Advanced Tools and Integrations
ImportGenius provides advanced analytics capabilities that enable users to identify market trends, competitor activities, and supply chain risks through built-in tools processing billions of shipment records.[3] These include customizable visualizations, such as interactive world maps with location-based pins for suppliers and customers, and the AI-powered Genius Company Profiler, launched in 2025, which instantly surfaces top trade partners for targeted companies.[1] Advanced search filters allow precise querying across parameters like commodities, trade routes, and date ranges, supporting complex operations such as AND/OR logic and exact matches.[23] [24] Automated alerts represent a core advanced feature, notifying users in real-time of new shipments matching criteria for specific companies, products, or commodities, thereby facilitating proactive monitoring without constant manual searches.[11] [23] Users can export reports in various formats and automate workflows to integrate insights into broader business processes.[3] For integrations, ImportGenius offers a RESTful API enabling programmatic access to shipment data in JSON format via endpoints like/v2/shipments, with daily updates for U.S. records (since 2006) and weekly for data from over 22 other countries.[24] This API supports pagination, count-only queries, and geographic filters such as U.S. zip codes, allowing developers to build custom applications, dashboards, and automated trade intelligence systems.[24] The platform also facilitates seamless connections with CRM, ERP, and BI tools, permitting direct embedding of trade data into existing enterprise systems for enhanced supplier verification and market analysis.[20] Custom dashboards further extend these integrations by generating executive-level reports tailored to user needs.[1]
Business Operations
Pricing and Subscription Models
ImportGenius provides tiered subscription plans designed for varying levels of trade data access, with options for monthly or annual billing to accommodate individual researchers, businesses, and large organizations. Pricing starts at $125 per month for the entry-level Essentials plan, which focuses on recent U.S. data, and scales up to custom enterprise solutions for global coverage across multiple countries. Annual subscriptions offer a 36% discount compared to monthly equivalents, encouraging longer-term commitments without mandatory contracts for lower tiers.[19] The plans differ primarily in data coverage, search limits, download allowances, and advanced features. The Essentials plan includes access to 12 months of U.S. imports and 5 years of exports, limited to 25 searches per day and 10,000 downloads per month for a single user. Higher tiers like North American Pro and Global Pro expand to include Mexico or additional countries, with increased search capacities (50 per day for U.S. and non-U.S. data), more downloads (up to 60,000 monthly), and tools such as AI-powered HS code search and the Genius Customer Profiler for supplier analysis. Enterprise plans provide unlimited customization, including API access, dedicated support, and coverage of over 23 countries, priced via direct sales inquiry.[19]| Plan | Monthly Price | Annual Price (36% Savings) | Key Features and Limits | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $125 | $1,500 | 25 searches/day, 10,000 downloads/month, 1 seat, basic U.S. data (12 months imports, 5 years exports) | U.S. only, customizable countries |
| North American Pro | $499 | $5,988 | 50 U.S. + 50 non-U.S. searches/day, 55,000 downloads/month, AI HS code search, Customer Profiler | U.S. + all Mexico trade lanes |
| Global Pro | $799 | $9,588 | 50 U.S. + 50 non-U.S. searches/day, 60,000 downloads/month, AI tools, add-on countries | U.S. + 3 countries (expandable) |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Unlimited searches/downloads, API, dedicated team, priority support, tailored integrations | 23+ countries |