Global trade compliance doesn’t sound sexy, until you realize it’s where trillion-dollar supply chains can rise or collapse on a single missed detail. That’s the world BITE Data Corp just took a bite out of, locking in a $2.5M Seed round led by Las Olas Venture Capital, with New Dominion Angels & Blue Impact Venture Capital joining the table. Add the $500K Pre-Seed from Techstars & REFASHIOND Ventures, and this AI-native SaaS powerhouse has stacked $3M to automate one of the most chaotic systems in global business.
Founded in 2023, BITE, Business Intelligence for Trade Enforcement, isn’t your run-of-the-mill compliance startup. CEO & Co-Founder Thariq Kara built ICE’s first Big Data system, managing a $400M IT portfolio for Homeland Security before launching NU Borders LLC with veteran investigator Tim Gildea. CDO & Co-Founder Anne Riitho brings the kind of range you don’t teach, an MSc from LSE, an MA from Boston College, & a track record scaling a nonprofit in rural Kenya by 900%. Together, they’re turning decades of trade enforcement scars into software precision.
BITE’s platform does what spreadsheets never could, automated screening across 350+ global watchlists, AI-driven tariff classification, & a compliance assistant named “Biscuit” that answers complex trade questions with GPT-4 muscle. Users cut manual screening time by 70%, classification errors by 50%, & enter new markets faster than regulators can draft the next sanction. For agencies like State, DHS, & DoD, or exporters trying to move product through a minefield of tariffs, that’s more than innovation, it’s survival tech.
This round’s backers are as strategic as they come. Las Olas Venture Capital, led by Dean Hatton, Mark Volchek, & Nate Vasel, has a nose for high-conviction B2B bets that redefine vertical SaaS. New Dominion Angels brings regional depth across the Mid-Atlantic, while Blue Impact’s Marlon Ramirez adds 25+ yrs of supply-chain grit, from co-founding Azul Airlines to leading Modern Logistics. That’s not just capital, it’s intellectual horsepower at scale.
The $2.5M will fuel BITE’s engineering expansion & build a sales org ready to capture a market on fire with regulatory volatility. As tariffs morph into geopolitical tools, compliance is no longer a checkbox, it’s an arms race of data. Trade has always been about leverage. The ones who control the data, control the flow. The future of trade isn’t manual, it’s machine-intelligent, & BITE Data just wired the grid.
