Profreight, Inc.
Karan Virmani
Chief Financial Officer and General Manager | Licensed US customs broker, freight forwarder and 3PL | Edison, New Jersey | HTS Fit-Check Call booked for Tuesday 11 August, 3:00 PM EDT
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Karan Virmani is CFO and General Manager of Profreight, Inc., a licensed US customs broker, international freight forwarder and 3PL founded in 1989 at JFK Airport by Monika Munro, who is still President and CEO and is herself the licensed customs broker. Karan has run finance and operations there since December 2015 and sits on the corporate board as Secretary and Treasurer. He is an LSE graduate in management and accounting, and his own LinkedIn profile names regulatory compliance as part of his remit. He replied to Ripple's cold email with a specific, technical question: whether the platform's HTS classifications carry a notation for additional applicable sections, naming Section 301 by name.
Ripple is talking to Profreight under the broker and intermediary exception: a company below the standard headcount threshold still qualifies when it classifies on behalf of other importers and could run their volume through the platform, which is what a customs brokerage does by definition. Profreight's trade data shows a large, multi-decade, high-diversity shipment book, 26,693 bills of lading in the fullest single record, spanning food, flooring, ceramics, textiles, chemicals, metals, plastics and industrial equipment, run by a team that reads small on every independently checked headcount source. Their own site already sells tariff mitigation: a Duty Reduction Consulting service, framed around tariff renegotiations "that can add up to 25% in duty", offered free to clients.
The honest one-sentence picture: a small, quiet, 37-year family-run brokerage with a real and probably larger-than-documented classification workload, led by a CFO who personally engages with the technical mechanics of tariff notation rather than delegating the question, and who chased a broken booking link to get this call scheduled.
The Conversation So Far
What he has actually seen and said
- Cold email, campaign "Brokers Registry". Sent from Adrian's sending account: "Karan, how is Profreight, Inc. getting HTS classification done, in-house or paying a broker per line? Asking because we built an AI that does it in minutes at higher accuracy, for a fraction of the fee. Pentagon Freight Services runs 1,000 HTS classification lines through us in 15 mins, and cut customs fee 40 percent. Want me to send the details?"
- 4 August, 20:16 UTC. Karan replied with a technical question in his own words: "Are these HTS classifications also with a notation for extra classifications needed like section 301 or another section that may apply to that particular HTS?"
- 4 August, 20:21 UTC. We answered yes and offered a call, with a Calendly link.
- 4 August, 20:39 UTC. Karan: "That link says page not found." He hit a broken link and still stayed in the conversation.
- 5 August, 07:01 UTC. Corrected link sent with an apology.
- 5 August. Karan booked: HTS Fit-Check Call, Tuesday 11 August 2026, 3:00 PM EDT, 25 minutes, with Adrian.
He replied to the first email, asked an operational question, and pushed through a broken booking link. That is high intent. His question is also the opening for the call: it is exactly what the platform's special-provision notation does.
Company Profile Intel
Karan Virmani
- Role: CFO and General Manager since December 2015, plus Secretary and Treasurer on the corporate board
- Based: Edison, New Jersey
- Education: BSc Management and Accounting, London School of Economics
- Before Profreight: Accounting and Operations Manager at Bellino Fine Linens (2009 to 2015), Head Accountant at Indowear Corp, a stint at Bank of America. All past roles, no current outside business ventures.
- Civic roles: Board member of the SKN Foundation and Treasurer of the New Jersey Leadership Program, both nonprofit
- Public voice: around 1,100 LinkedIn connections, no press or podcast presence found. A numbers person, not a public one.
Profreight, Inc.
- Founded: 1989 at JFK Airport, Jamaica, Queens. 37 years in continuous operation.
- Founder: Monika Munro, licensed US customs broker, still President and CEO
- HQ: 35A Brunswick Avenue, Edison, NJ 08817
- Headcount: sources disagree, 2 to 10 at one end, 11 to 50 at the other. Do not quote a number.
- Licences: CBP broker permit D82, IATA code 0118962, FMC-licensed OTI and NVOCC, CTPAT and ACE registered, NCBFAA member
- Name variants: appears in trade data as Profreight Inc, Profreight Brokers and Profreight Brokerage, all at the same Edison address
Key intel
- Their CBP broker permit D82 is verified against CBP's own published broker permit list, and their IATA registration is verified in the IATA CargoLink directory.
- The licence sits with the founder. Monika Munro is the licensed customs broker and still runs the company. Karan runs the money and the operations. A platform decision here likely involves both.
- Their own website already has a self-serve HTS code lookup tool and a Duty Reduction Consulting service offered free to existing and prospective clients, framed around tariff renegotiations "that can add up to 25% in duty". They have endorsed the category and are giving the work away.
- Karan's LinkedIn profile names regulatory compliance as part of his remit, which matches the Section 301 question he asked unprompted.
- The company publishes steady tariff-focused content, including "Breaking News on US Tariffs" and "Tariffs, Trade, and the End of the De Minimis Free Ride". The exposure is understood internally.
- Their largest named trade relationship is Mannington Mills, the major US flooring manufacturer, which matches their self-described flooring specialism.
Business Model
What they sell
- US customs brokerage: entries, clearances and compliance under their own permit
- Freight forwarding: ocean and air, IATA-approved, HAZMAT-capable
- 3PL: warehousing and distribution, dry and refrigerated
- Domestic trucking and inland delivery coordination
- Project cargo: industrial machinery and equipment moves
- Cargo insurance at negotiated underwriter rates
- Duty Reduction Consulting: tariff mitigation advice, currently free
How they make money
- Fee-based per customs entry and filing, plus forwarding margin and warehousing and trucking fees. They do not own the freight value.
- Nothing is priced publicly. 16 self-described target sectors from antiques to trade shows.
- Classification labor sits directly against brokerage margin: every hour spent researching a code is unbilled cost inside a fixed entry fee
- Family-owned, no outside funding found, running lean for 37 years
The structural point worth holding onto
Profreight classifies other companies' goods for a living, across one of the widest commodity spreads a broker can carry, with a team that reads small on every source. That combination means classification here is not repetitive single-product work, every line can be a different rulebook, and the cost of producing each classification with the correct special-provision notation lands on their own margin, not the client's. A per-line AI classifier is not a cost line for a business like this. It is a margin lever on work their clients already pay for.
The Numbers
Read this first
There is no reliable revenue figure for Profreight. Third-party estimates disagree by more than 20x, and one widely-indexed figure of $380 million was checked and rejected as almost certainly a different company with a similar name. Headcount sources also conflict. Nothing in this section should be quoted at Karan as a fact about his business. The trade figures below are ocean bills of lading only, which structurally understate a customs broker's real activity: air freight and most entry-filing work never touch a bill of lading.
Verified from primary sources
- CBP broker permit D82, Edison NJ, from CBP's own published permit list
- IATA code 0118962, from the IATA CargoLink directory
- 26,693 bills of lading on the fullest single trade record, October 2012 to July 2026, with 115 in the last 90 days on one name variant
- Top US ports: Newark, Charleston, Norfolk, Savannah, Houston
- Top foreign ports: Bremerhaven, Shanghai, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Antwerp
- Founded 1989, Edison Chamber of Commerce member
Estimated or contested, handle with care
- Headcount 2 to 10 or 11 to 50, depending on the source. The company LinkedIn page is stale, still showing the legacy Queens address.
- Revenue estimates span $1M to $25M, all low confidence. Do not anchor one.
- Labor cost roughly $1M to $4.5M a year, inferred from the headcount range at loaded NJ metro rates
- Trade records overlap across three name variants of the same company, so the counts are views of one book, never additive
- True entry volume: not public. Ocean data misses air freight and entry filings entirely.
The signal that matters
The commodity spread is the story. Across the trade records: ceramic tiles, organic food products, wooden flooring, refrigerated goods, textiles, biscuits, synthetic materials, aluminum, cocoa butter, potato starch, engine gaskets, furniture, iron and steel articles, plastics and vehicle parts. That corroborates their own 16-sector claim, and it means the classification burden per shipment is high-variance, many different HTS chapters, with Section 232 steel and aluminum and Section 301 China-origin provisions stacking on top wherever they apply. A small team is context-switching across all of it, line by line.
Pain Signals & Gaps
- Karan's reply asked whether HTS classifications carry a notation for "extra classifications needed like section 301 or another section that may apply to that particular HTS". That is not a generic question, it is the specific mechanic that changes most often right now.
- Profreight's own site frames its Duty Reduction Consulting service around tariff renegotiations "that can add up to 25% in duty".
- The company has published a steady stream of tariff content through 2024 to 2026, from customs regulation updates to de minimis changes.
- The AI classifier assigns the base HTS code and flags every applicable special-provision notation at classification time, so the notation stops being a second manual research step every time a tariff list changes.
- Headcount reads small on every independently checked source: 2 to 10 on LinkedIn, around 3 on Datanyze, 11 to 50 on the one unverified outlier.
- Against that team size, the trade data shows ceramics, food, flooring, textiles, chemicals, metals, plastics and industrial equipment all moving through the same book, and their own site claims 16 target sectors.
- Wide HS-chapter variety means classification is never repetitive single-product work. Every line can be a different rulebook.
- The AI classifier holds accuracy across commodity categories the way a small human team, switching context line to line, cannot.
- The fullest single trade record shows 26,693 bills of lading since October 2012, on a 37-year operating history.
- Ocean bill-of-lading data structurally understates a customs broker's activity: air freight and most entry-filing work never generate a bill of lading a tracker can see.
- Profreight is IATA-registered for air freight and FMC-licensed for ocean, so real volume runs across both channels at once.
- This is the exact shape of the proof point already in the outreach: Pentagon Freight Services runs 1,000 HTS lines through the platform in 15 minutes. Profreight's true monthly entry volume, most of it invisible to trackers, is the load that proof point was built for.
- The Duty Reduction Consulting service is explicitly offered free to existing and prospective clients. It is a retention tool, not a revenue line.
- Profreight is fee-based on entries and filings, so every hour of classification and tariff research sits directly against brokerage margin.
- No outside funding exists anywhere in the record. This is a lean, family-owned firm where margin is the whole game.
- The AI classifier drops the per-line cost of producing a tariff-noted classification, which is what currently makes the free consulting add-on a cost rather than a service they could price and sell.
- Profreight holds CBP broker permit D82, carries its own broker bond, and advises clients on continuous import bonds.
- Bond sufficiency is calculated off prior-year duties paid, and the current tariff stack, Section 232 steel and aluminum, Section 301, surcharges and port fees, inflates the bond and penalty math for anyone under-bonded or misclassified.
- This is precisely the exposure a broker-side CFO tracks personally, and Karan's own LinkedIn names regulatory compliance as part of his remit.
- Consistent, defensible classification with the correct special-provision notation reduces the misclassification risk behind CBP CF-28 information requests and CF-29 corrections, protecting Profreight's own bond standing, not only the client's.
Where the Classifier Adds Value
Profreight is a broker and third-party classifier, not an importer. Classification is something they sell, so the value is never framed as saving their team time. It is margin, capacity and a service they can price. These are the places it moves the needle.
The notation step Karan asked about, automated
His one question to us was whether classifications carry the Section 301 and other special-provision notations. Running client lines through the platform attaches those notations at the moment of classification, removing the separate manual lookup his own question points to. The call can open by answering his question with a demonstration rather than a yes.
Absorbing the commodity-diversity load
A platform that classifies at consistent accuracy regardless of HTS chapter lets a small team stop re-specializing line to line across ceramics, textiles, chemicals, metals and food in the same shift. The wider the spread, the more the classifier is worth, and Profreight's spread is about as wide as it gets.
Built for the volume the trackers cannot see
The Pentagon Freight proof point, 1,000 lines in 15 minutes, is built for exactly the scale a 37-year, IATA and FMC registered broker carries across ocean and air combined. The real number is Karan's to give on the call, and the platform is sized for whatever it turns out to be.
Turning free Duty Reduction Consulting into a paid service
Profreight already sells tariff mitigation as an idea, they just give it away. If the per-line cost of producing a tariff-noted classification drops, that service stops being a retention giveaway and becomes something Profreight can price, package and sell to the same clients, directly touching their own margin.
Protecting the bond, not just the entry
More consistent, defensible classification lowers the misclassification risk behind CF-28 and CF-29 corrections, in an environment where stacked Section 232 and 301 costs are actively inflating bond requirements. For the CFO who personally owns regulatory compliance, that is a risk argument as much as a cost one.
Questions for the Call
Watch-Outs
Never pitch this as replacing their expertise
Classification is what Profreight sells, and the licence holder is the founder who still runs the company. Any framing that sounds like "the AI does what your experts do" reads as "we automate away your product" and ends the conversation. The frames that work are margin, the cost of producing each classification drops inside a fee the client already pays, capacity, more lines through the same small team, and product, a free consulting service they could start charging for. The Pentagon Freight proof point works because it is a broker-side story, not an importer story.
Three numbers not to say out loud
- Headcount. Sources span 2 to 50. Naming a number that turns out wrong costs credibility for no gain. Ask Q2 instead.
- Revenue. Estimates span $1M to $25M and one indexed figure of $380M is flat wrong, a different company. Any number used will be invented, and the CFO will know it.
- "26,693 shipments." That is ocean bills of lading across overlapping name variants, not their entry volume, and it both understates and mismeasures what they actually file. Use it privately as evidence of scale, never as a figure quoted at him.
Two things to keep straight
There is an unrelated "Profreight Inc" in Brooklyn in the trade databases, a different company at a different address whose figures are excluded from this dossier, so do not cite anything sourced to a Brooklyn address. And Karan's earlier employers, Bellino Fine Linens and Indowear, are past roles that ended before he joined Profreight, not current ventures. His only current outside affiliations are two nonprofit board seats.