STARTUP STAGE: Trustd.ai helps rentals filter out bad behaving guests

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Safety concerns remain the biggest problem in the $335 billion sharing economy. Reports show that 11% of participants filed complaints. In short term rentals (STR), background screening is a commonly used safety method, however, it does not solve the problem. Property managers report that unruly guest problems have increased despite background screening. The undetected root problem is “bad behavior.”

In addition to background screening, Trustd.ai uniquely collects and aggregates behavioral data points across multiple booking systems. This magnifies multiple guest platforms, utilizing proprietary, innovative AI technology. The resulting trust metric is delivered to property managers in real-time.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

In current STR ecosystem, reports show that guest complaints have skyrocketed despite background screening. This is not surprising because guests are global, and problems are local. Local background screening and web scraping will not be a solution for a global problem.

Trustd.ai has changed how we treat guest safety problems by changing the focus from the “bad guest” to “guests with a bad behavior,” focusing on the behavior rather than the person. This is change of mindset in fighting with unruly guests. Since the behavior is a more global metric attached to guests, entire guest safety problem reduces to collecting behavioral data and processing it. Therefore, Trustd.ai has built an independent proprietary AI platform which collects measurable, objective data across multiple platforms, processes it and delivers the result to the partner systems in real time, in the form of behavioral footprint.

Behavior is the new currency in sharing economy, and Trustd.ai is the first one bringing the “behavioral footprint” concept to guest safety in STR, solving the problem from the root cause.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths
  • Tech Expertise – our CEO and CTO are top global AI experts 
  • Segment Expertise – our business development manager was a property manager and leading industry consultant 
• Weaknesses
  • Need to acquire robust behavioral data, which requires operational capacity and time.
• Opportunities
  • Engaging Trustd.ai in all sharing economy segments, thus establishing a robust, personal trust score minimizing physical, emotional and property risk.
• Threats
  • Some may view data collection as a privacy issue, however trustworthy individuals do not agree and are willing to share their behavior.  

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Physical, emotional and property safety. As the highly interactive, sharing economy grows, we need accurate, behavioral data in real-time for both guests and hosts.

So, you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We deliver our services via Amazon Web Services to property managers and insurance companies. Trustd.ai is currently onboarding major property management systems to access thousands of properties listed in United States and the European Union. Industry word-of-mouth is the best customer acquisition tool to date - we have many unsolicited requests, with demand currently exceeding our capacity.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Our product vision is to be the personal safety score in the $335 billion global sharing economy. We feel that credit and background checks are simply the starting points and by adding behavior augmented with proprietary AI technology, we can offer the ultimate safety measurement.

Our entry market is short term rentals in the U.S. and Europe, because the most expensive shared asset is home property.

How and when will you make money?

Initially, a Trustd.ai Score is offered free as a short-period trial to property managers. Since Trustd.ai includes background checks after the trial period, we charge a minimal fee - saving the property manager money and giving us needed data.  

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Trustd.ai was a finalist in the VRMA Battleground in 2021. Murat Sonmez, CEO, is an award-winning Ph.D. with work in AI applications, and he is the recipient of an NHRC Fellowship for the U.S. Navy. Alper Halbutogullari, CTO, has a Ph.D., and was recently recognized as one of the top 50 machine learning and data science experts to follow for 2023. Joe Mele, chairman, led two successful tech start-ups. John Power, CFO, is an MBA and Mark Chmiel, COO, is an ROI growth expert.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business? 

Yes, our leadership and advisory team are gender, race and ethnically diverse.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

As it is the case for all data driven businesses, the data collection has been the most challenging part of the business.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

Luck is not a strategy. We believe we are making a significant impact because we are solving a true industry problem - guest and host trust safety. Our innovative, ever-evolving database, delivers an added-value industry solution, matched by none.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We believe Trustd.ai is becoming the industry standard for trust safety.

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.

Our endgame is to continue expanding our database across other verticals; eventually offering a universal consumer trust score resulting in a safe, value-driven sharing-economy.

PhocusWire's Startup Stage
click here for the full archive