Company Updates
Before DutyDeclared was a company, it was an opportunity we spotted at MultiModal in 2025. Stand after stand showed how far logistics had come: live fleet tracking, automated warehouses, routes planned in seconds. Customs sat at the centre of it all, yet the way clearance was managed had barely changed.
Other industries had already moved on. Accounting software made financial admin something you could handle with confidence. Mobile banking turned days of paperwork into a few taps. Payroll, tax returns and even property searches went from processes only specialists could handle to tools anyone can use. Customs had been left behind.
At the time, we were launching innovation labs to build technology for industries that needed it. It quickly became clear that Customs needed it more than most.
DutyDeclared is the result: a UK customs clearance platform that turns your shipment documents into a declaration, shows where each extracted field came from, and files directly with HMRC.
This is why we built it, what we believe, and where we’re going.
2025, MultiModal at the NEC in Birmingham. Behind all the technology on display, and the growing promise of AI, one thing quickly became clear: a customs entry still came down to someone retyping invoices line by line, second-guessing commodity codes, and chasing the one detail that always went missing at the worst moment.
None of it was unusual, and that was the point. Everyone we spoke to in the sector described the same frustrations. They had simply accepted them as the price of doing customs properly.
We didn’t. With our combined engineering, product and digital transformation experience, we knew there was a better way, and we set out to build it.
Customs keeps global trade moving. The tools used to manage it haven’t kept up.
For decades, customs clearance has been shaped by process and tradition: rigid systems that expect you to already know your way around. So people learned to work around their tools.
Brokers re-check work that carries their name. Forwarders juggle declarations while trying to get goods on the road. Importers carry the responsibility for what’s declared in their name, often without a clear view of it.
Meanwhile, the rest of working life moved on.
Some newer platforms have tackled the problem by putting a modern interface on the same underlying process. It looks better. It works the same.
We took a different route. We looked at how declarations actually get made, step by step, and rebuilt the process itself. Most software modernises the screen. We’ve modernised the process.
In practice, your documents do the data entry. Each extracted field links back to the document it came from. Commodity codes are checked and missing details flagged before anything reaches HMRC, and the declaration is filed directly with the Customs Declaration Service, with its status there for you to follow.
See How a Declaration Gets Made
From uploading an invoice to following your MRN, take a tour of the platform
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Complexity is no excuse for a poor experience
Customs is one of the most regulated parts of trade, and for years, difficult systems have been accepted as the price of getting it right. We see it the other way round: the more complex the task, the more thoughtfully the tool should be designed. A clear platform makes work faster and mistakes easier to catch, so a better experience and a more accurate declaration go hand in hand.
Trust has to be earned, so we show our working
Customs can’t afford to be wrong. That’s why you can see exactly what’s been declared, and why, before anything is submitted. It’s also why anyone can try DutyDeclared for free, with no implementation fee and no sales call. We’d rather let the product speak for itself.
Real innovation happens one step at a time
We build alongside our customers, improving what matters most to them and bringing them with us as the platform grows. That applies to getting started, too. One customs team braced for weeks of setup. They had a fully onboarded team in less than seven days.
DutyDeclared brings together three things customs clearance has rarely had at once: people who have felt the problem, people who know what good software feels like, and people who build for sectors where accuracy isn’t optional.
Joshua Oliver, CEO and Co-founder, has spent 15 years in enterprise SaaS, moving from direct sales to building and scaling teams. That started at MuleSoft, through its IPO and $6.7bn sale to Salesforce, and continued at Transmit Security, through its record $543m Series A. He knows what regulated businesses need from their tools: trust, precision and an experience people want to use.
André Moresco, CTO and Co-founder, has spent 15+ years building regulated software across fintech, retail and SaaS, and built the DutyDeclared platform from the ground up. Regulated sectors don’t forgive errors, and that’s the standard he holds the platform to, from pulling data off a document to filing with HMRC.
Alexandre Gibson, Chief Product Officer, is a product executive with 20 years’ experience, including leading a 60-strong engineering strategy team at Volkswagen and large teams in healthcare and B2B SaaS. He makes sure every step is designed for the person doing the work, which is why the platform shows its working and teams are onboarded in minutes, not months.
Sophie Ranner, Customer Success Manager, brings half a decade of hands-on experience handling import and export declarations at a major UK port. Having managed the exact day-to-day clearance workflows our users navigate, she understands precisely where submissions get stuck and what frictionless processing requires. That front-line insight directly guides platform development, client onboarding, and ongoing user support as operations expand.
Behind them is a team of engineers, designers and account specialists who work closely with the people using the platform, while our board and advisors know what it takes to grow technology that a specialist industry comes to depend on.
We don’t just build DutyDeclared for our customers. We build with them. The people filing declarations every day know exactly where the friction is, so we put the platform in their hands early, listen to what slows them down, and fix what matters most to them before anything else.
Today, advisory practices, brokers and freight forwarders file with DutyDeclared, including Hillier Hopkins and Mannson Freight, some after years on platforms they had relied on for decades.
That commitment doesn’t end at launch. What our customers tell us decides what we build next, and as the platform grows, they grow it with us.
We’re recognised by HMRC and were winners at the Tolley’s Taxation Awards 2025. Still, the measure we care about most is whether the people using DutyDeclared would choose it again.
We’re starting with the declaration, because that’s where the friction is sharpest. But a declaration is one moment in a much longer journey.
Our direction is a shared view of that whole journey, where the importer, the forwarder and the broker see the same picture, from the opening invoice to the final audit.
No more blind trust that someone else has it handled, and no more chasing for updates.
We’ll get there the way we’ve built everything so far: one step at a time, with our customers.
You already know what good software feels like. You just haven’t had it for customs. Until now.
You don’t need a business case to find out, and you don’t need to sit through a demo. Log in, run a real declaration and see exactly what you’re getting, with 10 free entries every month.
Join the teams already filing with DutyDeclared
Run your next declaration on the platform our customers helped shape, with 10 free entries every month
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Customs, built around you