SAIL (SAIL GTX Inc.)

Johnson Cornell Tech MBA (at the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island), Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, part of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University

Industry: AI / B2B SaaS / Supply Chain / Global Trade / Trade Compliance

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Salik Tehami Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ‘25, Chansam Kim Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’25, Ali Raza NYU Stern MBA ’25

Brief Description of Solution: SAIL utilizes AI to assist companies in understanding the nature of their imported products, the duties they owe, and the necessary documents required for compliance. Instead of spending weeks sorting through paperwork and guessing tariff codes, teams get accurate results in minutes. This saves time, prevents costly mistakes, and can uncover millions of dollars in duty savings while keeping shipments moving.

Funding Dollars: $100,000 from Cornell Tech Runway Startup Studio, Winning Cornell Tech Startup Award

What led you to launch this venture? We met dozens of trade compliance directors across energy, chemicals, and industrial manufacturing who all said the same thing: “We’re guessing million-dollar decisions.” We were shocked to learn that even Fortune 500 importers still rely on manual document review, email chains, and spreadsheet-based classification, despite billions of dollars at risk. With our combined backgrounds in industrial operations, AI, and product development, we saw a clear opportunity to build the first AI-native execution layer for global trade. SAIL was born from a simple insight: Trade compliance shouldn’t take weeks, and teams shouldn’t lose millions because the systems haven’t evolved.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? SAIL launched an enterprise-grade product now used by a paid multinational conglomerate in materials manufacturing, with additional pilots underway at Fortune 500 companies in automotive, energy, chemicals, and apparel. We’ve proven that a problem long considered too complex for automation can be solved and that large enterprises are ready to adopt it.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? Our biggest challenge was building trust in an industry where accuracy is critical. Mistakes in trade compliance can delay shipments or lead to penalties, so teams tend to be cautious about adopting new tools. To address this, we focused on making SAIL transparent and easy to verify. We provided clear explanations for every result, enabled customers to compare our output with official tariff rules, and updated our system daily with the latest regulations. We also tested the product extensively with experts so companies could clearly see how decisions were made.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? The MBA program at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management has been essential to building SAIL. Our founding team comes from engineering, but we lacked experience in areas such as finance, go-to-market strategy, and business modeling. The Cornell Johnson MBA gave us the foundation we needed to design and grow a real company, not just a product.

Cornell Tech’s entrepreneurial environment, specifically the Startup Studio and the hands-on entrepreneurship sessions, played a major role in accelerating SAIL. These programs pushed us to test our ideas quickly, validate our assumptions, and build with real customers in mind.

Just as important, the mentorship and alumni network helped us refine our product through direct customer discovery conversations and guidance from experts in AI, supply chain, and business strategy. The support from the MBA community made it possible for us to move much faster than we could have on our own.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? Startup Studio has been the most valuable part of the program for building SAIL. It is an ideal environment for early founders because it forces you to test your idea with real users, refine your story every week, and move quickly from concept to product. The biggest lesson I learned was the importance of constant validation; talking to customers early and often is what creates real momentum.

Among the traditional MBA classes at the Johnson School, Entrepreneurial Finance and Business Models were especially helpful. They provided tools to understand how a startup operates as a business, how to plan for funding, how to design a sustainable model, and how to think like an entrepreneur from day one.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Two professors significantly influenced the development of SAIL in its early days. This first is Professor Krishnamurthy Kambhampati, who taught Business Models. He helped us craft a structure that was both competitive and sustainable. His guidance encouraged us to think clearly about who we serve, how we deliver value, and how our model can grow over time.

Professor Tom Schryver, who taught Entrepreneurial Finance, played an equally important role. His classes taught us how to engage with investors, how to explain our revenue model, and how to think about valuation and funding in a practical way. His lessons gave us the confidence to approach early investors with a strong foundation.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? New York, one of the world’s leading financial and business hubs, has been a major advantage for us as founders. It gives us direct access to a wide range of investors and global enterprise customers. In addition, university-based accelerator programs, such as the Johnson Cornell Tech MBA Startup Studio and NYU’s Catalyst, have made it much easier and faster to test our early ideas, get real product feedback, and receive the right support at the right time. The New York startup ecosystem has played a crucial role in helping SAIL grow.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? Our long-term goal is to build an AI platform that supports every major step of global trade. We are starting with customs compliance, but we plan to expand into logistics, sustainability tracking, carbon-smart routing, and eventually trade finance. We want companies to have a single, straightforward platform that helps them manage all the challenges of global trade, saving money, avoiding delays, and staying compliant with evolving regulations. Our vision is for SAIL to become the trusted system that makes global trade easier, safer, and more efficient for companies around the world.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? The biggest lesson I wish I had known earlier is the importance of making deeper customer discoveries before building the solution. Talking to more users upfront would have helped us understand their real challenges and the problems that are truly universal across the industry.

Once we began speaking with customers regularly, it became much easier to see the common pain points and what they needed. It also helped us remove our own assumptions and design a product that solved real, shared problems—not just what we initially expected.

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