US and Indian cargo containers with flags of USA and India
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For small companies caught in the global trade war, AI-equipped trading platforms can be one of the few defenses. Tariffs increase costs for importers and exporters around the world, as companies not only have to pay duties, but keep track of shifting regulations, reroute shipments, and find lower-cost suppliers in a landscape where the rules are changing fast. Small businesses have the least flexibility to raise prices or to adapt.
But AI systems that that help small businesses cope with increasingly complicated global trading environment, managing costs or finding lower-cost suppliers, are on the rise, offering some defenses.
“Trade wars have caused short-term challenges with tariffs, delays, and compliance changes. Yet they also create room for adaptable businesses to stand out, diversify, and strengthen their global presence,” said Saurabh Mittal, founder of Chococraft, headquartered in Delhi, India, in emailed comments. Chococraft exports custom chocolates – think those nifty chocolates printed with company logos or people’s faces.
Chococraft works with Xindus, one of a new class of startups—Distichain and Verto are other examples in the broad category, the former headquartered in Abu Dhabi and the latter founded in London—that help smaller exporters cope with increasingly complicated global trading environments.
Xindus is focused on small businesses in India – a market that’s been in turmoil this year in the wake of Trump’s trade war, which was hit India especially hard.
“Xindus’s job is to give tools to small businesses,” said Tom Hyland, a long-time investor and advisor who is working as global head of strategy for Xindus. “Just as Alibaba or Amazon did, we want to take all these brands global. If an Indian brand wants to go global – people do not have access to do that.”
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Yet, this is a larger challenge in today’s trade environment as compared to the years when Alibaba and Amazon were growing. The world’s largest market by GDP, the United States, throws up barriers. Trade between the United States and India is worth about $90B in goods, though this may have dropped precipitously in 2025. After failed rounds of negotiations, many goods from India face a 50% tariff. “The India/U.S. partnership has been going up and up,” said Hyland, who co-founded Aspada, an early-stage, impact-focused, venture capital fund based in Bangalore. Anchored by the Soros Economic Development Fund, Aspada was sold to the LGT Group of Liechtensten in 2019. “This was clearly a surprise.”
Xindus’ founder, Saurabh Goyal, spent years living inside the machinery of global supply chains and came out convinced that the small players in them needed tools built for their reality, not for Fortune 500 giants. His story tracks the trajectory of India’s emergence as a manufacturing hub, the rising contest between China and India for U.S. market share, and the ways in which today’s trade war hits the smallest firms hardest.
Building India’s iPhone Supply Chain
Goyal’s introduction to the fragility of global trade came during the years he helped build Foxconn’s India operations. “I was running the supply chain business for them,” he said. It was a period when Apple, under pressure to diversify its manufacturing base beyond China, was shifting more production to India.
Between 2016 and 2022, Goyal and his teambuilt one of Apple’s largest new supply chains from the ground up. A modern smartphone depends on as many as a hundred different manufacturers across metals, plastics, chips, adhesives, packaging and logistics. “It’s an unforgiving cycle,” he said. “In two or three months a component can be obsolete. And they make thin margins. You don’t have the same buffer that other industries have.”
The work revealed India’s promise — and its constraints. “In China, the factory is right next to the airport,” he said. “In India, it takes two days to get to the airport.” Logistics costs were far higher — India was spending around 13% of GDP on logistics — and the bureaucracy, while improving, remained a barrier. But the success of the iPhone project was a revelation for him. “It was the starting point,” he said. “You could do an iPhone in India.”
That window into the machinery of globalization also showed him how vulnerable small businesses were. Apple’s ecosystem in China had tens of thousands of specialized suppliers, many of them small. In India, upstream and downstream small businesses were struggling to integrate. “Integrating small businesses into a supply chain is easier said than done,” he said. But when it works, those are the firms through which profits diffuse across an economy.
A Moment of Decision
By 2022, with iPhone production scaling and Foxconn expanding labor forces rapidly — “Foxconn was confident they could manage the labor,” he recalled — the work was still gratifying. But the global context was shifting. India and China were jockeying for control of supply chains serving the U.S. market. At the same time, the past few U.S. administrations have been pushing to move more manufacturing back to the United States. Tariffs were rising. Rules were changing.
“It was the opportunity that was too large,” Goyal said. “I’m an entrepreneur. And I wanted my two daughters to see that you can go and do great things.” In early 2023, he walked away from equity at Foxconn to launch Xindus with two co-founders and $10 million in seed funding.
The company began modestly: helping small exporters move goods across borders more reliably. The first product was a cross-border network for shipments, paperwork, and returns. It was not glamorous, but demand was immediate. “A lot of businesses were telling us, ‘You should do this,’” he said. “Even though shipments created pain points for them — this was needed.”
What struck him was the tone from customers: “When the customer is willing to take personal pain for you to succeed as an Indian company — that’s important,” he said. There was another factor: small exporters felt unheard. “Global companies can’t really listen to the small customer,” he said. “We built for their needs, where they’re at.”
In those early months, merchants complained that they had little choice but to use FedEx. That helplessness, Goyal realized, was becoming a defining feature of small-business trade.
The Tariff Squeeze
By 2024, tariffs and compliance costs surged as the U.S., India, and China all hardened positions. For Indian exporters in cosmetics, ayurvedic ingredients, fashion, electronics, and automotive parts — the core of Xindus’s user base — the compliance burden rose.
Margins were already thin. In many of these sectors, 30–60% of a product’s final sale value comes from supply chain costs, according to Goyal and Hyland.
Layer tariffs on top of that and entire categories become uncompetitive overnight. According to Goyal, Xindus’ platform can reduce those supply chain costs by around 20% — because they prevent avoidable waste and manage returns better.
The pattern Goyal sees among the roughly 1,000 businesses now using the platform is clear: volatility is the new normal. “Ten to twelve new businesses sign up each day,” he said. Many are simply trying to hold onto the U.S. market. Others are using the tariff turmoil as an opening to diversify into Southeast Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.
What This Means for Globalization
Hyland doesn’t romanticize global trade. “Global trade will happen,” he said. “It’s happened for 3,000 years and it will happen for another 3,000.” What’s different now is the technological burden placed on the smallest participants. AI is no longer a “nice to have” — it is becoming a prerequisite for staying connected to global markets.
Hyland also points out that India remains a protectionist economy in many ways; the United States is merely joining the protectionist club. Yet market dynamics eventually force change: consumers want goods, manufacturers want markets, and supply chains shift to accommodate both.
Despite the turmoil, Goyal’s view is pragmatic. A growing domestic market — India is currently the fastest-growing major economy — provides insulation. But he’s clear-eyed that global small businesses are at risk. When supply chains reconfigure under tariff pressure, the first firms to fall out of the system are the smallest, and the hardest to bring back in.
The question embedded in his story is larger than Xindus: If only firms with sophisticated digital infrastructure can survive a trade war, what happens to everyone else?