Hi everyone! We’re Philip, Kyle, and Daniel from CommodityAI. We are building a platform for commodity traders to manage their shipments.

tl;dr CommodityAI makes it easy for commodity trading companies to manage their shipments. One of the largest sugar traders uses our product to classify over a million documents, extract relevant fields from them, and organize them by shipment. They also use us to execute shipment-related workflows, like sending shipment status updates and generating vessel nominations.

The Problem

Shipping commodities requires a company to manage ~200 processes and over 50 documents. Now imagine you're managing thousands of shipments a month, and tens of thousands in a year. As a result, a trading company’s workforce spends ~70% of their day on admin and 40% of operating costs are allocated to labor. Almost all of our customer calls have had one thing in common: the trader or operations person can recall a time in the past 6 months when a document or process error resulted in the firm losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

These processes also differ between customers. In other words, no 2 customers run their commodity trading operations the exact same way. This makes it difficult to build a one-size-fits-all solution without being intimately familiar with the space and the nuances of these shipments.

The Solution

We’ve built AI, automation, and collaborative tools built specifically for commodities trading. Our customers use CommodityAI to manage thousands of shipments and process millions of shipment-related documents. This includes classifying them, extracting relevant fields, and organizing them. They also use our platform to automate a series of time-consuming, related tasks that they do in their day-to-day, such as tracking vessels, generating vessel nominations, and sending real-time updates to their counterparty.

Document Processing Workflow: Classify, Extract data, create shipment

Track and Send Shipment Status Updates

Our goal is to ultimately take the number of manual processes within a commodities shipment down to 0, transforming the way commodity trading companies manage their operations.

Ask

We know there aren’t too many commodity trading companies probably checking YC every day, but we do know many founders worked as traders or know traders from previous work experience! We’d be extremely grateful for any introductions to potential customers or investors =).