The Idea: In the mid-2010s, Alex Yancher was running operations at Lynks.com, an international personal shopping site that helped people around the world buy from US e-commerce stores. His job was to stitch together a network of cross-border carriers and customs brokers, and he hated it. "Incredibly challenging and complex," he later called it. Every country had different customs rules, different VAT thresholds, different last-mile carriers, and roughly a thousand different ways to lose a parcel. The big legacy carriers (FedEx, DHL, UPS) had logistics but no software. The DTC platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce) had software but mostly ignored anything past the US border. Yancher's insight was that the real gap wasn't logistics, it was systems - tying customs, taxes, software, and physical delivery into one stack a brand could just plug into. So in 2017 he teamed up with Aaron Schwartz and started building exactly that. This was the beginning of Passport.
The Execution:
- 2017: Yancher and Schwartz co-found Passport in San Francisco, positioning it as a "modern international shipping carrier" - software-led, no trucks of their own, with customs and tax compliance baked directly into the merchant's checkout. They close a seed round by December.
- 2020: Passport closes a $12M Series A led by M13, with Kleiner Perkins, Resolute, Precursor, and Republic joining. By this point Passport has shipped nearly 3M packages and is growing customers' international volume 43% year over year. Early brands include Betabrand, Native, and Bombas.
- 2021: Passport acquires Access Worldwide, an Atlanta-based logistics company, adding physical infrastructure to the software stack. They now own the full pipeline rather than just sitting on top of legacy carriers.
- 2022: A $39M Series B led by TCV closes, with Flexport, FJ Labs, Pure Imagination, and angels like Nik Sharma, Quince CEO Sid Gupta, and Italic CEO Jeremy Cai piling in. Total raised hits $54M. Around the same time, Tom Griffin (who grew DHL Express revenue to $300M) joins as President.
- 2024-2025: Passport launches Passport Global - an all-in-one internationalization product bundling shipping, compliance, localization, currencies, and DDP checkout. Customers like Ritual and iHerb sign on. The company acquires Brand Access in January 2025 to add in-country fulfilment in the UK, Canada, EU, and Australia. By now Passport serves 1,000+ brands across 220+ markets on 6 continents.
- 2026: Global-e (NASDAQ: GLBE), the Israeli giant powering global DTC commerce, announces it's acquiring Passport for $350M upfront (split roughly 50/50 cash and shares) plus up to $75M in earnouts tied to 2026 results - a total deal value of up to $425M. Passport is expected to do roughly $100M in revenue this year. The deal is set to close in early July.
The lesson? Yancher saw an unsexy problem - the patchwork mess of international shipping for DTC brands - and decided to own the entire systems problem instead of just one slice of it. While legacy carriers focused on freight and DTC platforms ignored anything past the US border, Passport quietly bundled software, logistics, and compliance into one stack. Nine years, $54M raised, $425M exit. The boring middle of the supply chain is often where the biggest exits hide.