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Information for current and prospective investors in TrustRating.
ConsumersBusinesses
Every online purchase begins with the same unanswered question: is this company safe to deal with?
Consumers make more decisions online, about more unfamiliar companies, than at any point in history — and the infrastructure they use to judge those companies is thin. Incumbent review platforms carry decades of accumulated distrust, much of it deserved: pay-to-play suspicion, opaque moderation, and coverage that stops at whoever bothered to sign up. Search results, meanwhile, are increasingly generated rather than ranked, which makes the provenance of a recommendation harder to see rather than easier.
TrustRating starts from a different primitive. A company does not have to join, pay, or consent in order to be assessed: a panel of large language models evaluates it from public evidence, and verified customer reviews carry equal weight in the published rating. That combination gives the platform something a pure review site cannot have — coverage from the first day — and something a pure AI ranking product cannot have, which is the lived experience of people who actually paid.
The commercial consequence is a market in which the audience and the customer are different parties, and the product only works while the audience trusts that the customer cannot buy the outcome. We have built the company around that constraint rather than against it, because the constraint is also the moat: a competitor who monetises score adjustments can win a quarter and cannot win a decade.
Ratings are free to read and free to earn. Revenue comes from the tools a business wants once it is being talked about.
| Revenue stream | What it is |
|---|---|
| Free public ratings | Every rated company has a profile whether or not it pays, which is what brings consumers to the platform — and therefore the companies. This layer is deliberately never monetised. |
| Business subscriptions | Claimed companies pay for the tooling around their profile: public replies, review invitations, analytics, team access, and support. Plans scale with the size of the operation, never with the rating. |
| Widgets and API | Companies display their rating on their own storefront through embeddable widgets and integrate review data through the API — distribution that serves the customer and puts the platform in front of new consumers at the same time. |
| Reports and enterprise | Deeper trust reporting, category benchmarking, and arrangements for organisations that need more than a single profile. |
The obvious way to raise revenue per customer on a review platform is to sell relief: better placement, quieter moderation, a nudge to the number. It works, briefly. It is also how every incumbent acquired the reputation problem that makes them possible to compete against, and it converts a durable asset into a rented one.
So we have drawn the line inside the product rather than in a policy document. Plan entitlements govern tooling only: no tier touches score composition, review ordering, or moderation outcomes. Model answers are stored individually and shown, including where they contradict each other. Reviews are never removed automatically, and never at a paying customer's request. The methodology is published in enough detail to be argued with — a constraint we accept precisely because it is expensive to fake.
The relevant question for an investor is not whether independence is admirable but whether it compounds. We believe it does. Trust is the only thing a consumer-facing rating platform genuinely sells; it accumulates over years, it can be destroyed in a quarter, and it is therefore the hardest asset for a better-funded competitor to simply buy.
These are constraints on the business model. We would rather you know them before a conversation than after one.
Plainly stated, without a roadmap you could not hold us to.
Public profiles, AI panel scoring, verified human reviews, moderation tooling, and the business panel are in production rather than in a deck.
Plans, billing, review invitations, embeddable widgets, a public API, and trust reporting all exist and are in use — which means unit economics can be measured rather than modelled.
The immediate work is breadth of rated companies, depth of verified reviews per company, and the channels that put a rating in front of a consumer at the moment of decision.
We are early-stage and focused on product. If and when we raise, it will be to accelerate coverage and distribution — not to buy growth the model does not support.
The ones we would ask about if we were sitting on your side of the table.
Most product diligence is answered in public. These are the pages worth your time.
Answered as directly as we can answer them in public.
We are early-stage, bootstrapped, and focused on product. That is the honest answer at the time of writing, and this page is the first place we would update if it changed. Introductions are still welcome — most good rounds begin as a conversation months before a process.
Coverage, review volume, and platform activity are visible across the site — every rated company shows its own numbers. Revenue, retention, and cohort detail are shared under an NDA inside an active conversation, not on a public page.
Ownership is concentrated with the founding team. We are happy to go through the detail directly rather than in public.
No. Nothing on TrustRating is an offer of securities, and we do not accept investment through the site or through any form on it. Any investment would follow documented agreements after a conversation.
No, and that is the design constraint. Businesses pay for tooling — replies, invitations, widgets, analytics, reporting — and none of it moves a rating. If a thesis requires us to sell score adjustments, we are not a fit for one another.
We are building a company worth owning rather than one on a sale schedule, and we would rather not perform a five-year narrative we cannot support. What we can discuss concretely is the market, the mechanics, and the numbers.
TrustRating is an early-stage company. We're currently bootstrapped and focused on building product. If you'd like to be notified when we open a round, please reach out at
investors@trustrating.aiInvestor mail is answered by the founding team, so please be specific: stage, cheque size, and what you would want to see. If you are researching the category rather than considering an investment, say so — we are glad to talk, and it saves us both a diligence dance neither of us needs.
Investor questions go straight to the founding team, and we answer them ourselves.