Ryan Petersen is the founder of Flexport, a freight forwarding and customs brokerage company.
Early life and education
Both of Ryan Petersen’s parents possessed their own businesses in Bethesda, Maryland, where he grew up. Petersen’s mother started Novigen Sciences, a leading engineering consulting firm, and later sold to Exponent, while his father possessed a software company that provided regulatory compliance software to large food companies.
Ryan Petersen attended University of California, Berkeley and earned a degree in economics in 2002, and an MBA, Marketing, General Management, Entrepreneurship from Columbia University – Columbia Business School in 2008.
Ryan Petersen was at Beta Gamma Sigma, a Dean’s Lister and a Top Scholar Award Recipient. Petersen also wrote Computer Warehouse Group, a business school case published in summer 2008 and now taught in dozens of MBA programs across Africa, as well as in CBS Private Equity course. Petersen also earned Columbia’s 2010 E-cademy Award, akin to an Entrepreneur of the Year prize for his work building ImportGenius.com.C
ImportGenius.com
From February 2003, Petersen worked as a Chief Operations Officer in Wasauna LLC until July 2006. A year later, Petersen co-founded and became the CEO of ImportGenius.com, along with his brother, David Petersen, and friend, Michael Kanko.
They originally founded Import Genius on July 20, 2007; however, didn’t become well known until a few years later. They envisioned using Import Genius as a database tool in serving importers and exporters associated with international trade. The company’s debut finally happened in 2008, after Petersen discovered a significant revelation: All of the shipping manifests or the documents that hold title information on goods entering the US are a public record of the United States.
Ryan Petersen secured some 380 million such documents, indexed them, made them searchable, and in 2008, they started ImportGenius.com. Since then, Import Genius has been produced not only for importers and exporters, but also to support researchers, investors, freight forwarders, and even for legal purposes.
Now, Import Genius is known as a world leader in organizing, collecting, and making sense of Big Data on the international trade industry. Through high-leveled data management technologies, the company is able to support its clients make sense of hundreds of millions of customs records and shipping manifests from private companies and government agencies around the world. ImportGenius.com clients attain these data through a flexible web application that delivers insights into the real-time shipping activities of their suppliers, competitors, and others in the export-import space. In 2013, Petersen resigned Import Genius to concentrate on simplifying international trade and customer experience using automation and software in transporting of large-scale goods.
As of 2017, the ImportGenius.com produced more than $9 million in income, according to Ryan Peterson.
Flexport.com
In March 2013, Petersen founded Flexport, a freight forwarding and customs brokerage company based in San Francisco, California. Flexport is the first global freight forwarder and customs brokerage established around an online dashboard. Flexport has risen $304M to date, including $110M in its latest Series C round.
Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, told the Bloomberg News in April 2015 that there will be more international trade because of Flexport and the international trade is a huge thing for there to be more of. According to India’s The Economic Times, Flexport is one of the few freight-forwarding outfits to make it accessible to transfer goods through customs and around the world by digitizing the international shipping. In May 2015, the company told 36kr.com, a Chinese media outlet that they were on speed to create $60M in sales for 2015. Flexport had more than 600 customers in 2016. It has expanded revenue by 25% every month in the 30 months since they founded Flexport.
As of 2017, Flexport has increased $94 million in venture capital from such investors as First Round Capital, Google Venture, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. In July 2016, Flexport had 420 employees in seven offices, including Amsterdam, Atlanta, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen, and was worth $365 million. In a 2017 Forbes’ interview, Petersen mentioned the company began opening own warehouses for consolidating cargo customer shipments located in L.A. and Hong Kong with ideas to have a global network. Ryan Petersen is also a contributor to TechCrunch.
In 2018, Flexport has scored more than $300 million in funding and moves about 100,000 shipping containers per year, many of which pass through the Port of Los Angeles. In August 2018, Flexport named 8th fastest growing company in the US with a three-year growth of 15,911.00%. As of 2018, Flexport has reached $471 million revenue.