Portage

Icewine: the UK ranks first, and the US is marked closed because Canadian wine is banned there from September 29, 2026.
Portage ranks export markets for Canadian honey from official data. Japan comes first, the US drops down the list, and Mexico is closed.
The CPTPP certification of origin, pre-filled from the business profile. It takes Canadian honey from a 25.5% tariff to 0% in Japan.
A drafted first email to a real Japanese importer, which the owner edits and approves, plus a voice note in Japanese made with ElevenLabs.
Canadian producers heading to the same market share one container, with one freight quote request for the whole group.
Federal export programs, with eligibility rules quoted from official pages, and honest 'likely not eligible' when a business doesn't qualify

Inspiration

The US has an inherent economic advantage: an American business has about 340 million customers at home before it needs to look abroad. A Canadian business has about 41 million. To grow, Canadian businesses have to export, and for decades that meant the US: in 2024, 65.9% of Canada's goods exporters sold only to the United States.

On August 22, 2026, the US put a 50% tariff on hundreds of Canadian products. Natural honey was one of them, and the US was buying 68% of Canada's honey exports. Fifteen thousand beekeepers just lost their biggest market, and most of them don't have a trade department.

At the fireside chat, Ian Burgess told us to answer two questions: what is the problem, and why hasn't anyone solved it?

The problem: Canada can't grow its population overnight, so its small businesses have to find customers abroad to grow. For a small business, that's hard: which market, which rules, which forms, and who to sell to. Most never try anywhere but the US, and now the US is closing the door.

Why it hasn't been solved: people have tried, but every piece is built for someone else. The UN has free tools that rank export markets, but they're built for analysts and stop at "where". Brokers handle the paperwork, and 80% of small exporters pay one. Co-ops like Bee Maid let producers ship together, but they took decades to build and exist in few industries. And most small businesses don't know government export help exists. The pieces exist; they're scattered, and they cost time and money.

What it does

Describe what you sell in plain English, and Portage:

Ranks export markets for your product. Each market gets an Opportunity score (how much it buys, at what price, how fast it's growing, how established Canadian products already are) and an Ease score (tariffs, paperwork, shipping, currency and country risk, tax). Closed markets are marked closed, not scored.
Shows its work. Every tariff and requirement links to its official source with a date, and carries a badge: Verified, Auto-sourced, or Not verified.
Drafts the paperwork, like the CPTPP certification of origin that takes Canadian honey from 25.5% to 0% in Japan.
Points to government help a business may qualify for, and says honestly when it doesn't.
Finds a buyer and writes to them: real importers, a drafted first email, and a voice note in the buyer's language, generated with ElevenLabs.
Ship together (preview): one small producer can't fill a container; six can. Portage groups Canadian producers heading to the same market, drafts one freight quote request for the group, and lists certified (CIFFA-member) freight forwarders.

The AI never decides the facts: the language model only reads your description and drafts messages. Rankings, tariffs, requirements and paperwork come from sourced data and fixed templates.

How we built it

Backend: Python and FastAPI. A transparent, weighted scoring engine over hand-verified data files, every row with its source URL and date.
Live data: UK Trade Tariff API (import rules for any product), WITS/UNCTAD TRAINS (tariffs), UN Comtrade (trade flows), with caching and offline fallbacks.
AI: an OpenAI-compatible LLM (DeepSeek) for profile extraction and email drafts; ElevenLabs eleven_multilingual_v2 for voice notes.
Frontend: React, Vite and Tailwind.
Research: official sources only: the CBP Section 338 list, Japan Customs, CFIA, foreign regulators, CBSA, AAFC, Statistics Canada, the Trade Commissioner Service and the CIFFA directory.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the facts right. A news article said maple syrup was hit by the new US tariff; the official CBP list says it isn't. We switched our demo to honey, and made "official source or it doesn't ship" a rule.
Compliance doesn't scale by hand. Tariffs exist as data for every product; import rules mostly don't. We built three confidence levels so Portage covers any product without pretending to know rules it hasn't checked.
The rules keep moving. The US tariff list was re-scoped on September 15, and some Canadian goods, including wine, go from a 50% tariff to an outright US import ban on September 29. Every data row carries an as-of date.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A ranking a judge can audit line by line, back to the regulator's page.
Live UK import requirements for any product code.
A buyer email and a Japanese voice note ready to send in under a minute.
Icewine, Canada's signature export: Portage marks the US as closed from the September 29 ban and ranks the UK, Japan and South Korea instead, all duty-free.

What we learned

The information to export exists; the bottleneck is turning it into action. And small businesses don't need another chatbot. They need a finished next step, and each other.

What's next for Portage

Partner with the groups that already have the exporters: chambers of commerce and provincial export offices, starting with a pilot with their members.
Work with freight forwarders to build real shipping quotes into Portage, so a group of producers can go from "let's ship together" to an actual price.
Accounts and real shipping groups, and alerts when a tariff or rule changes for your product.