Jeff Tan

COO and Co-Founder Expedock

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Jeff Tan is a co-founder and the chief operating officer of Expedock, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2019 that sits at the intersection of two things freight forwarders badly need: software that can read their paperwork, and people who can handle what the software cannot. Expedock’s platform digitises shipping documents, reconciles them against shipment records and pushes the results into logistics and financial systems, and the company pairs that automation with offshore operations teams it recruits, trains and manages on customers’ behalf. Tan is the operator of the founding group — where his co-founders came from Stanford computer science and machine learning research, he came from the freight floor, having managed the international movement of thousands of containers at one of the Philippines’ largest forwarders. That division of labour is the company’s basic premise: the problem it is solving is an operational one that happens to be tractable with AI, rather than the reverse.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Expedock in 2019 with King Alandy Dy, Rui Aguiar and Jig Young, and has been chief operating officer since.
• Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2023, in the Industry, Manufacturing and Energy category, with the Expedock founding team.
• Raised a $4 million seed round announced in February 2021 and a $13.5 million Series A announced in August 2022, roughly $18.6 million disclosed in total.
• Scaled the company’s offshore operations model to more than 300 teams built and over 1,000 professionals deployed across more than 40 countries, with roughly 95 percent client retention, on the company’s own figures.
• Managed the international movement of thousands of containers at CNT Worldwide Transport over roughly three years before founding Expedock.
• Backed by Motion Ventures, the maritime and logistics specialist fund, among other investors.

Professional Journey

Tan’s route into logistics was deliberately unglamorous. Rather than approaching freight forwarding as an outside technologist, he went to work inside it, spending around three years in operations management at CNT Worldwide Transport, one of the largest freight forwarders in the Philippines, where he handled the movement of thousands of containers internationally. Freight forwarding runs on documents — bills of lading, arrival notices, invoices, customs paperwork — and on people re-keying those documents between systems that do not speak to one another. That is the problem he learned from the inside.

In 2019 he co-founded Expedock with King Alandy Dy, an AI researcher from a shipping family who had studied computer science and product design at Stanford and worked as an NLP engineer at Shopee; Rui Aguiar, who became chief technology officer; and Jig Young, who became chief product officer after time at Kalibrr and First Circle. Dy became chief executive and Tan chief operating officer. The founding team was young — all in their twenties, three of them Filipino — and the company was built from the start across San Francisco and the Philippines.

The product applied AI to read freight paperwork and invoices, categorise them and surface profit-and-loss insight for supply chain businesses, with the company reporting accuracy around 99 percent and cost savings of up to 90 percent for customers. Investors followed quickly: a $4 million seed round announced in February 2021, then a $13.5 million Series A announced in August 2022, bringing total disclosed funding to roughly $18.6 million. Motion Ventures, which specialises in maritime and logistics technology, became a hands-on backer, with Dy publicly crediting the firm with bringing in deals and unlocking customer opportunities.

In 2023 the founding team was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list under Industry, Manufacturing and Energy. Expedock has since broadened beyond freight: the company now presents itself as a tech-enabled workforce augmentation platform serving logistics firms, healthcare providers, retail and ecommerce startups and other small and mid-sized businesses, drawing on a vetted candidate pool it reports at more than 100,000 people. Tan’s remit as chief operating officer — building and running the offshore teams that sit alongside the software — has become a larger share of what the company sells.

Education

No education could be established. Sources directly contradict each other: an investor-published founder profile states that Tan left college to work in freight forwarding, while a contact-data aggregator lists a 2020 degree from Ateneo de Manila University in Information Technology Entrepreneurship and Computer Science. Neither claim is corroborated by a primary source, so neither is recorded here.