Air, sea and road forwarding from a Preston base, with customs entries filed in house rather than through a broker
Customs agent listing + company site
Use cases
Find freight forwarders and logistics decision makers
Most of them are small privately held firms with no marketing. Search by mode, trade lane, licence or region, and Causo reads FMC ocean transportation intermediary licences, AEO authorisations, Companies House filings, operator licence records and bill of lading data firm by firm, then shows you the evidence behind every match.
Run your first search40,000 freight forwarding and logistics firms worldwide, represented through FIATA
How to find freight forwarders by mode, trade lane or location
3 results for this search. Pick another above to see what it returns.
12 staff across Manchester and Liverpool, LCL consolidation plus an in-house clearance desk
Companies House + company site
Customs brokerage and road freight, GVMS and pre-lodgement submissions handled internally
Port community listing + company site
Illustrative example. The source types are the ones Causo genuinely reads for this market.
Where the data on freight forwarders comes from
- FMC ocean transportation intermediary licencesLicensed US ocean freight forwarders and NVOCCs, licence numbers and status
- Customs entries and bill of lading recordsTrade lanes, consignees, volumes and direction of travel
- DVSA and Traffic Commissioner operator licence recordsVehicles and trailers authorised, operating centres and transport managers
- EU and UK AEO authorisation registersAEOC and AEOS status, authorisation date and the holding entity
- Companies House, state registries, HandelsregisterOwning entity, directors, shareholders and filed accounts
- BIFA, FIATA and port community directoriesMembership, mode specialism and trade association standing
- Indeed, Greenhouse, LeverCustoms clerk, import and operations roles as a timing signal
- Dun & BradstreetFirmographics and corporate linkage where available
- Plus many moreNo fixed provider list. If the answer lives somewhere else, the agents read that instead.
Ask anything about a freight forwarder
Every result is a starting point, not an endpoint. Ask a follow-up about any forwarder on your list in plain English and the agents go back out and read for it, then answer with the sources they used.
Do they clear customs themselves or use a broker?
AnswerIn house. They are a registered customs agent filing their own entries, and the team page lists two entry clerks.
SourcesCustoms agent listing + the company’s own site
How many trucks do they actually run?
AnswerSix vehicles and eight trailers authorised on a standard international operator licence, from a single operating centre.
SourcesGoods vehicle operator licence record
Which trade lanes do they actually move?
AnswerMostly Far East to UK ocean imports, with a smaller air freight flow out of Turkey. Shipment records show steady monthly volumes rather than one-off consignments.
SourcesBill of lading records + company site
Why freight forwarders are missing from B2B databases
86%of UK freight forwarding and transport support firms employ fewer than 10 peopleONS UK Business Counts via Nomis, 2025
Contact databases are assembled from what companies publish about themselves: professional profiles, funding rounds, tech stacks, hiring pages. Forwarding is the opposite kind of business. Volume arrives through shippers who already know the office, through overseas agent networks and through the port community, so the marketing budget is a stand at a trade show and a partner listing. What the trade does produce is licences and paperwork. A forwarder moving US ocean cargo holds an FMC ocean transportation intermediary licence. A firm clearing its own entries is a registered customs agent, and the entries themselves become customs and bill of lading records. A firm running its own trucks holds a goods vehicle operator licence naming its vehicles, its operating centre and its transport manager, and a firm trusted by customs holds AEO status. Every one of those is public, and none of them is where a profile-derived database looks.
Figures as of August 2026.
Apollo vs ZoomInfo vs Causo for freight forwarder leads
| Apollo / ZoomInfo | Buying a list | Causo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner-run forwarders with 5 to 15 staff | Largely absent | Absent | Found through licence and customs records |
| Filtering on "holds AEO status" | No such field | No such field | Expressed in plain English |
| Knowing whether they run their own trucks | Not recorded | Not recorded | Read from the operator licence record |
| Reaching the owner or customs manager | Usually a generic office address | Often bounced | Named role, verified address |
Frequently asked questions.
Start from the licence records rather than a database. Forwarders handling US ocean cargo are listed by the Federal Maritime Commission as ocean transportation intermediaries, UK firms running their own vehicles appear in Traffic Commissioner and DVSA operator licence records, customs-trusted operators appear in the AEO registers, and every consignment leaves a customs entry or a bill of lading. Causo reads those alongside Companies House and BIFA and FIATA member directories, so a forwarder with no marketing presence is as findable as one with a website.
Those databases are assembled largely from professional profiles and web signals that skew heavily toward software and services. Around 86% of UK freight forwarding and transport support firms employ fewer than 10 people, and an owner-run forwarding office of eight people usually has no profile to scrape, so it never enters the database and no filter will surface it.
The firm, why it matched, the evidence behind that with its source, and the decision maker with a verified email address. You can then ask follow-up questions about any result, such as whether it clears customs in house or how many vehicles sit on its operator licence, and get answers with sources attached.
Yes, in plain English. None of those is a field in any contact database, so Causo works them out from the AEO registers, FMC ocean transportation intermediary licences, goods vehicle operator licence records and bill of lading data rather than looking them up.
It is read at the moment you search rather than pulled from a stored snapshot, so an operator licence varied last month or an AEO authorisation granted in the spring appears in this month’s results.
Yes. The sources differ by country, so Causo uses the local equivalents: in the United States that is the Federal Maritime Commission licence list for ocean freight forwarders and NVOCCs plus customs and bill of lading records, and elsewhere it is the national company registry, the customs authority’s AEO or trusted trader register and the local transport licensing body.
It depends on the size of the firm. At an owner-run forwarder of ten people it is usually the managing director or the owner, sometimes wearing the transport manager hat as well. At a firm of fifty or more it is more often an operations director, a customs manager or an IT lead, and the import and export clerks are the people who have to live with the decision. Causo surfaces the role alongside the firm so you can tell which of those you are looking at.
One token per researched company, per decision maker found, per question asked and per outreach sequence sent. Plans start at $10 a month, and the first 10 tokens are free with no card required.