Flexport

Notes compiled from publicly available sources. Last updated: 2026-07-29. Every figure is linked to the source it came from and dated. Verify against primary sources before relying on them.

TL;DR

Flexport, Inc. is a San Francisco company founded in 2013. It is a licensed freight forwarder and customs broker that operates its own software platform: clients book ocean, air and trucking freight, clear customs, and track shipments through flexport.com and a public REST API. Since 2023 it also runs the ecommerce fulfilment business it acquired from Shopify.

• Current job postings state that companies move "more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year" on Flexport (posting, updated 2026-07-09).
• About $2.5B raised across ten rounds; the last priced round was a $935M Series E in February 2022 at an $8B valuation (Crunchbase).
• Shopify holds roughly 17% fully diluted. Its equity-method carrying value was $602M at 2025-12-31, and its share of Flexport's loss narrowed to $40M in FY2025 from $138M in FY2024 (Shopify 10-K, filed 2026-02-11).
• A current posting describes the stack as "coming from a React/Flow + Ruby on Rails monolith, and moving to React/Typescript, Kotlin Microservices on Kubernetes" (Senior Software Engineer, Customs, updated 2026-07-10). US postings publish base salary bands.

Basic

Regulated entities

Flexport is not only a software company; the regulated licences are what let it act as principal in the shipment. Stated in its own terms (accessed 2026-07-29):

These are the company's own statements. They were not cross-checked against the FMC's public OTI register or CBP records in this pass; an attempted lookup on the FMC search endpoint returned an error on 2026-07-29.

Market context as stated by the company

• Global trade is described as "a $10T industry" and, in older posting text, as "an industry that comprises 12% of the global GDP" (postings, 2026-07).
• The CEO describes the industry's manual work — "people passing PDFs and moving data between enterprise systems" — as the target for AI agents (Dealroom note; accessed 2026-07-29).

Product

Service lines

Ocean freight, air freight, trucking, customs brokerage, B2B and ecommerce fulfilment, returns, cargo insurance, trade finance ("Capital"), duty drawback, product classification, trade advisory, and emissions reporting — each has its own page under flexport.com/products.

Platform and developer surface

• Flexport Platform, Control Tower, Customs Suite, and Flexport Intelligence for booking, visibility, customs and analytics.
• Atlas — a public interactive view of global ocean freight with vessel, port and route data.
• A public REST API with v1/v2/v3 versioning, webhooks for milestone events, pagination and a changelog, covering shipments, containers, purchase orders, bookings, customs entries, invoices, products, and network resources. EDI documentation is published alongside it at developers.flexport.com.

Product releases are published on a seasonal cadence: the Winter 2025 release (2025-02-24) announced 20+ products including Flexport Intelligence and Control Tower; the Winter 2026 release adds Atlas, a customs-broker audit tool, a tariff refund calculator, an AI consolidation engine for container utilisation, digital routing guides, AI search and translation, and NetSuite and TikTok Shop integrations.

Commercialization

Revenue is transactional rather than subscription: clients pay for freight moved and services performed, so the meaningful figure is net revenue (gross revenue minus the cost of the transportation bought), not gross revenue. No public price list exists; the platform quotes rates per shipment through flexport.com/rates. Fulfilment, customs brokerage, insurance and trade finance are separately priced services.

Reported scale over time

Acquisitions and divestitures

Stated plans

The CEO describes roughly 100 costly core workflows targeted for AI agents, five of them already live and saving money, with about 80% of the remainder needed in 2026 to justify the spend, alongside a positioning shift toward cost leadership (Dealroom note; accessed 2026-07-29). Job postings describe a new San Francisco "Autonomous Freight Systems" team building AI-driven rates and self-serve booking so that clients "commit freight on technology alone, with no account executive and no operations touch" (posting, 2026-07-09).

Founder

Ryan Petersen — co-founder and CEO. Flexport went through Y Combinator and raised from Founders Fund, First Round Capital and Google Ventures in its early rounds (Wikipedia; accessed 2026-07-29). He handed the CEO role to Dave Clark, previously Amazon's consumer chief, in 2022, and resumed it in September 2023 after Clark resigned (Wikipedia). He writes the company's strategic posts, including the Convoy Platform sale rationale (2025-07-28).

David Petersen — named as a co-founder alongside Ryan on Wikipedia; most company material names only Ryan Petersen. No current role at Flexport was found in the sources reviewed.

No leadership or team page listing current executives was found on flexport.com as of 2026-07-29.

Funding

Total raised is reported as about $2.5B across ten rounds (Tracxn; accessed 2026-07-29). Shopify's stake is roughly 17% on a fully diluted basis including warrants and options, and it also holds a commercial agreement and a co-marketing agreement with Flexport, under which Shopify recognised $9M of expense in FY2025 and $4M in FY2024 and nil revenue share in FY2025 (Shopify 10-K).

Engineering

Technology stack and platforms

From current postings on the company's own board, dated 2026-07:

Open source: the flexport GitHub organisation has 69 public repositories (accessed 2026-07-29), mostly Ruby tooling — rubocop-flexport, quarantine for flaky-test handling, and activejob-limiter — plus forks of vllm-production-stack and llm-d-deployer, which are LLM-serving infrastructure. An engineering blog is linked from the careers site at flexport.engineering; it did not respond to automated requests on 2026-07-29.

Systems

Technical background sought

Separating what the postings require from what they merely prefer:

• Required on AI roles: hands-on agent patterns, RAG, prompt engineering, tool use and evaluation — described as going "beyond 'AI familiarity'" (posting).
• Required on infrastructure roles: production ownership on cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, containers and service-oriented architectures, data warehousing and pipeline work (posting).
• Required on security roles: application security across a polyglot codebase — Ruby, Java/Kotlin, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python (posting).
• Preferred, not required: experience with the existing stack itself — "Experience with elements of our tech stack: Java, Spring Boot, Ruby on Rails, React, AWS" appears under "it's a plus" on the San Francisco roles (posting).

The Customs posting states the team is "tech-agnostic regarding candidate background," and the careers site says engineers without freight forwarding experience are welcome (careers; accessed 2026-07-29).

Industry domain

The work sits on international freight forwarding and customs, which is the same domain as Shippio but at US and EU regulatory scope:

• Customs and trade compliance — customs entries, HS classification, duty drawback, tariff refunds, and broker error rates; the Winter 2026 release includes an audit tool for other brokers' filings and a tariff refund calculator (release).
• Regulated intermediation — operating as a licensed OTI under the FMC and as a customs broker under CBP shapes what the software is allowed to do on a client's behalf (terms).
• Freight economics — carrier contracts and allocations, rate sheets, container utilisation and consolidation; a stated 10% freight-cost reduction comes from a consolidation algorithm (about page).
• Documents and interchange — purchase orders, commercial invoices, bills of lading and EDI message flows between enterprise systems (API docs).

Domain knowledge is explicitly not a hiring prerequisite; it is expected to be learned on the job.

Working conditions

Notes

Not publicly disclosed

Searched on 2026-07-29 across flexport.com, its careers and developer sites, the Greenhouse board, GitHub, and Shopify's SEC filings:

• No company-published headcount, revenue, or valuation. Every financial figure on this page comes either from Shopify's filings or from third-party analysis.
• No public price list or rate card; pricing is quoted per shipment.
• No security certification (ISO 27001, SOC 2) is claimed on the site pages reviewed.
• No leadership or executive team page.
• The engineering blog linked from the careers site did not respond to automated requests; its contents were not reviewed.

Inconsistencies across sources

• Valuation. $8B was the February 2022 round price and is still the figure most databases carry. Sacra estimates $3.8B as of 2024 by imputing from Shopify's stake. Shopify's own 10-K reports an equity-method carrying value, which is an accounting balance and not a valuation. The three are not comparable.
• Revenue. $2.1B for 2024 is gross revenue; ~$450M for 2025 is net revenue. Both circulate without the qualifier.
• Headcount. ~2,100 (2025) appears on Wikipedia; the company's about page gives only "more than 400 software engineers", undated.
• Founders. Wikipedia names Ryan and David Petersen as co-founders; company material names only Ryan Petersen.

Other

• The Convoy Platform was bought in November 2023 and sold in July 2025, about 20 months later, for a reported ~$250M against a reported ~$16M purchase price; Flexport kept the brokerage business running on it (company post).
• Four rounds of layoffs were reported between December 2022 and October 2024, including ~20% in October 2023 and ~2% in October 2024.
• Shopify is simultaneously a shareholder, a convertible-note holder, a commercial partner and a co-marketing counterparty (Shopify 10-K). Its filings are currently the most reliable public window into Flexport's finances.
• Engineering is split between the US, the Netherlands and three cities in China, with the newest AI teams posted in San Francisco and Amsterdam (job board; as of 2026-07-29).

Resources

Official

• Flexport · about · newsroom · blog
• Careers — engineering · Greenhouse job board · job board API
• API documentation · developer FAQ and EDI docs
• Atlas — public ocean freight map
• Terms and conditions, including licence statements
• Flexport Platform · Control Tower · Customs Suite · Flexport Intelligence · rates
• Winter 2026 product release
• Why We Bought, Built, and Sold the Convoy Platform, 2025-07-28
• Series E announcement, 2022-02-07 · Series D announcement, 2019
• GitHub organisation · rubocop-flexport · quarantine · engineering blog

Filings and financial

• Shopify 10-K for FY2025, filed 2026-02-11 — equity-method investment, convertible notes, related-party agreements
• Shopify 10-Q, filed 2026-05-05
• Sacra — revenue and valuation analysis
• Tracxn — funding history · Crunchbase Series E

Third-party coverage

• Business Wire — Series E, 2022-02-07
• PR Newswire — Winter 2025 release, 2025-02-24
• GeekWire — Convoy Platform sale to DAT, 2025 · FreightWaves
• CNBC — October 2023 layoffs · Supply Chain Dive — October 2024 layoffs
• Dealroom — CEO interview on net revenue and AI agents
• Levels.fyi — compensation data
• Wikipedia