AI shopping agents need to know which merchant to trust. We built the signal, proved it changes their pick - and we're ready to take it out of the sandbox.
Soon your assistant does the buying, not you. When an agent has a thousand merchants for one product, a single question decides the sale: which merchant does it trust?
The checks that exist are gameable. The one that matters has no answer.
"None of the protocols address merchant trustworthiness, reliability, or likelihood of fulfilment." - confirmed across all six, from their own specs.
As real money moves through agents, today's signals become the attack surface - and the defence isn't another gameable badge, it's reliability measured from real outcomes, read from a neutral source no merchant can spoof.
No agent trusts a rival's say-so. The only trust layer every agent can read is the one no platform owns. UCP is Google-controlled and donated to no neutral body - the centralized seat is taken; the neutral one is wide open.
Neutrality is a position the giants structurally cannot occupy. That's the seat we're building for.
A physical store, a Google Business Profile, and multiple 5-star reviews. Visible, trusted, choosable.
Fulfilment, no retail - so Google revoked the Business Profile, and every review vanished with it. A reliable store, invisible to agents - for a reason that has nothing to do with whether it delivers.
Trust today is rented from a platform and revocable at its whim. KAAL is our merchant-zero - we're building the reputation a merchant owns, because we're the merchant who lost it.
Measured from KAAL's real transaction data - sales, deliveries, refunds, disputes - signed so it can't be faked, and published where an AI agent can read it. The v1 loop runs end to end, today.
A signed statement of fact. "Stripe attests: 12,400 orders, 0.3% dispute rate." Vouched for by a party with no reason to lie.
The tamper-proof envelope. Issuer signs, merchant holds, any agent verifies - without phoning the issuer.
A self-owned identifier - a W3C web standard, not a token or a chain. No platform issues it or can revoke it; it's the mechanism behind "the merchant owns it."
It rides the rails that already exist - published as a W3C Verifiable Credential, the same envelope Google's AP2 and Mastercard use. UCP-compatible, never UCP-dependent. The merchant connects once; any agent verifies in milliseconds.
Shown a verified reliability signal, agents went 0% → 92% for KAAL - vs just 3% for the same numbers self-declared. When the agent fetches and verifies on its own, it settles around 70%. Either way, a vast lift from zero.
Given only a fetch tool and no nudge to care about trust, they fetched the credential 100% of the time, picked KAAL ~70%, and dropped to 0% on bad numbers. They read the content, not the label.
A forged credential carrying better-than-real numbers was rejected by every model. Self-declared and unsigned - also rejected. Only the genuine, independently-signed record wins. n=15, three models.
Pre-registered across Claude, GPT and Gemini - on our own store, in days, for almost nothing. Honest scope: LLM-agent proxies in a sandbox, not live shopping surfaces.
A hard-to-fake reliability signal actually changes which merchant an AI buys from - and it's the verification, not the numbers, that does it. A signed credential is an authentication floor, not an amplifier: it makes forged and unsigned claims worthless. That's the clean answer to "isn't this just a badge?" - at the crypto layer, a fake one can't win.
The question is no longer whether it works. It's timing and reach - when agents weigh trust at scale in the wild. We don't bet the company on that clock; the wedge pays on today's demand while the data moat compounds.
The intersection - measured, portable, neutral merchant reliability - is the empty seat. That's us.
A $1T+ agent channel by 2030. The comps - S&P, Moody's, Experian, D&B - prove trust-data is durable and high-margin. Our edge isn't their regulatory mandate; it's first-mover data accretion, neutrality, and being agent-native.
The record is free to read at the point of purchase, forever. Meter the lookup and agents route around it - ubiquity is the moat.
Pay to be measured, verified and equipped - distribution, conversion, tooling. Never to move the score. Trusted = chosen = more sales.
Platforms, processors and underwriters license the dataset (SLA feed, not per-query). They earn on trust decisions at scale.
Revenue never depends on charging for a verdict - the one thing that kills adoption and invites lawsuits. The pre-seed rests on merchant subscriptions, not a someday-fintech.
We can observe millions of stores from the outside - a thin-file baseline before anyone signs up, upgraded to a measured record when they connect. Exactly how a credit bureau works, and it can't be back-filled.
The Switzerland position no platform can occupy - rivals can't be each other's trust authority.
The record is merchant-owned and portable - they carry it everywhere, which is why they adopt and stay.
First mover accretes the data and becomes the default reference before any incumbent can turn. The bureau is never empty.
The mechanism is proven in the lab - it moves agents, it rejects forgeries. The next proof is the market: a paying merchant who isn't us, and the signal working on live AI shopping surfaces - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini. That is exactly what this pre-seed funds.
We've earned the right to scale the test. Now we need the runway to run it for real.
All three go full-time on close. Commerce, identity & attestations, and cryptographic engineering - with two prior exits between them.
12-18 months to: the team full-time, the first paying merchants who aren't us, and the signal live on real AI shopping surfaces - the milestones that earn the seed.
When does agent-driven commerce hit scale - and how do we stay first while it does?
Neutrality is the moat; staying independent (the Moody's path) is the exit. We want a partner who's mapped this.
Report facts, not verdicts; a dispute process from day one (FCRA-style). We'll do the homework with the right counsel.
The fastest path from KAAL-as-proof to the first hundred paying merchants.
We're not looking for just a cheque. We want pre-seed partners who've thought about these and will help us navigate them. Everything else is open for discussion.
The trust layer for agentic commerce is inevitable, and it can't be the platforms. We built the signal, proved it works, and we're ready to go full-time and find the first customers.
Out of the sandbox - together.