Building the commercial foundations for a global trade platform

Global food and agricultural trade is fragmented and opaque, and it is hardest on the people with the least leverage: emerging-market producers and smaller enterprises. Pricing is difficult to discover, traceability is unreliable, and reaching serious buyers across borders requires infrastructure most producers do not have.

Building a platform for that world is as much a commercial problem as a technical one. Which markets first? At what price, in economies with very different purchasing power? Through which partners? Those questions needed answers before launch, not after.

I lead sales and strategy. In practice that has meant designing the commercial architecture ahead of the platform itself: the market-entry sequence, a pricing model calibrated to local purchasing power rather than a single global rate, the partnership strategy, and the sales-operations infrastructure — research, workflows, follow-up and pipeline discipline.

I also work day to day with the AI/ML engineers. My rule there is that business questions come first: what we need to know about a market, to what standard, decided before any model is built. It keeps the research honest and the engineering pointed at something real.

At Gulfood 2026 in Dubai, I led an eight-person team through a deliberately structured activation — a digital signing workflow and a daily performance cadence rather than a stack of business cards. The team came back with more than 150 signed letters of intent and memoranda of understanding: early relationships to develop, not revenue, but a genuine test of whether the proposition lands with real traders. It does.

T57 remains in its pre-launch phase. Commercial planning is progressing alongside product development, fundraising and partnership discussions.