Built after losing ₹1.5 lakhs.

The ₹1.5 lakh lesson

trustRate started from a real loss, not a market-research exercise. In Varanasi, founder Pranav Singh extended ₹1.5 lakhs of trade credit on nothing more than another business's word — no record of how they'd treated other sellers, no way to check it, no way to know he wasn't the fifth person they'd done this to. The money never came back.

What stayed with him wasn't just the loss — it was realising that every seller who'd dealt with that same buyer before him almost certainly knew something he didn't, and had no way to tell him. India runs an enormous amount of its real economy on exactly this kind of informal credit — goods handed over today, payment promised later, nothing written down that the next person could check. A GST filing proves a business exists. A CIBIL score proves they pay their bank loans. Neither one says anything about whether they pay the people who actually extend them goods, money, or work.

What we're building instead

trustRate is a shared reputation layer for trade credit — built so that the next person extending credit to a buyer doesn't have to find out the hard way what the last five already know. Every agreement is confirmed by both sides, every repayment (on time or late) feeds one rating, and that rating follows the buyer, not any single seller's private notebook.

trustRate is built and operated by House of BumbleBees Technologies LLP, incubated at IIT BHU. trustRate never lends money itself and is never a party to any agreement made on it — we build the record both sides can trust, not the loan.