South Florida Startup TrustDots Wants to Build the Trust Layer for AI-Powered Commerce

Online shoppers have never had access to more information. There are product descriptions, star ratings, customer reviews, influencer recommendations, Reddit threads, certifications, recall databases, company reports and increasingly, AI-generated product recommendations.

Yet having more information has not necessarily made it easier to answer one deceptively simple question: Can I trust what I'm buying?

South Florida startup TrustDots is building a platform around answering exactly that.

The Entrepreneurs Behind TrustDots

South Florida entrepreneurs Darie Dorlus and Kyle Speidell are combining deep technical expertise with proven business-building experience to tackle one of the digital economy's growing challenges: determining what consumers can truly trust.

Dorlus, a longtime senior software engineer and founder of SynctTech, or Synchronized Technologies, brings years of experience in software development, technology architecture and building sophisticated digital solutions. His technical background and work with artificial intelligence provide the foundation for TrustDots' ambitious technology platform, which is designed to transform massive amounts of fragmented data into actionable consumer intelligence.

Speidell brings a different but equally valuable perspective. A seasoned entrepreneur with experience building and scaling companies, he previously co-founded The Green Solution, which grew into one of Colorado's largest vertically integrated cannabis operators. Now based in South Florida, Speidell continues to build and invest in businesses through Spydell Enterprises, bringing operational expertise, business strategy and a track record of scaling companies.

Together, the co-founders bring complementary strengths to TrustDots: Dorlus's technology-driven vision and engineering expertise, combined with Speidell's entrepreneurial leadership and experience scaling businesses.

Their shared ambition extends beyond creating another consumer shopping application. They're working to build an independent trust intelligence platform that could fundamentally change how people, and eventually AI-powered agents, evaluate products, brands and purchasing decisions.

A Bigger Mission Behind the Technology

For Dorlus, the inspiration behind TrustDots goes well beyond product ratings, artificial intelligence or building another successful technology company. At its core, the startup reflects two deeply personal motivations shared by its founders.

Speidell's interest began with a question many parents and conscientious consumers face: What exactly are we bringing into our homes, feeding our families and supporting with our purchases? Speidell and his wife had long been intentional about the products they purchased, often spending hours researching how products were made, where materials originated and what the companies behind them represented. They wanted to understand not only what they were buying, but whether those purchases aligned with their values.

Dorlus approached the challenge from a different perspective, one rooted in his personal philosophy about the responsibility that comes with opportunity. "My self-given North Star, the North Star of my life, is to give people a second chance at life," Dorlus explained.

Originally from Haiti, Dorlus recognizes that his own journey and opportunities have afforded him privileges that many people around the world may never experience. That awareness has shaped both his personal values and the kinds of technology projects he chooses to pursue. Throughout his career, he has gravitated toward ambitious projects with the potential to improve lives, from initiatives addressing global carbon emissions and environmental challenges to technology designed to help healthcare professionals and hospitals operate more efficiently.

"I consider myself to be a citizen of the world," Dorlus said. "We need to do something with what we've been given. Sure, we can make money, but what are we doing? What are we leaving behind? What's our legacy?" That philosophy ultimately helped shape the larger mission behind TrustDots.

Dorlus began thinking about one of the few forms of influence nearly everyone possesses: purchasing power. Individually, a consumer choosing not to purchase a product may have little influence over a multinational corporation. But what happens when millions of consumers, armed with credible information, begin making purchasing decisions based on shared values? The potential impact becomes much more significant.

Dorlus offered a hypothetical example involving a major consumer brand. “If two people in South Florida stopped buying its products because they disagreed with the company's practices, the financial impact would be negligible. But if a million consumers made that same decision, the company might have a compelling financial reason to reconsider those practices.”

That idea became one of the fundamental hypotheses behind TrustDots: Could better-informed consumers collectively influence companies to make better decisions?

The goal isn't necessarily to tell consumers which products they should or shouldn't purchase. Instead, it's to provide the transparency and evidence necessary for individuals to make choices that reflect their own priorities.If enough people begin making those choices, Dorlus believes the collective impact could extend far beyond individual shopping carts. "We can individually act on our values to collectively make a difference," Dorlus said.

It's an ambitious proposition, one that assumes greater transparency can influence consumer behavior and that changing consumer behavior can ultimately influence corporate decisions. Whether that hypothesis holds true at scale remains to be seen. But it helps explain why Dorlus is willing to pursue a challenge that even members of his own team initially questioned was possible.

For TrustDots, success would mean more than helping someone choose a safer product or a more responsible brand. It would mean creating a technology platform capable of giving millions of consumers the information they need to turn everyday purchases into a collective force for change.

Turning Scattered Evidence Into One Score

The concept begins with a familiar consumer problem: researching a product can require looking across numerous sources that were never designed to work together.

TrustDots analyzes information including regulatory actions, recalls, ownership records, certifications, ingredients and materials, supply-chain information, legal records, complaints, review patterns and company disclosures. The result is a Trust Score ranging from zero to 100, accompanied by evidence intended to show consumers why a product, company or seller received its score.

Consumers can access the platform through its mobile application or browser extension. A shopper can scan a product barcode, search for a product or brand, or use TrustDots while browsing supported online retailers. The company's browser extension currently supports product pages across retailers including Amazon, Walmart and Target.

But the number alone may not be TrustDots' biggest differentiator.

Trust is personal. One shopper may be particularly concerned about product safety. Another may prioritize sustainable manufacturing. Others may care about labor practices, company ownership, corporate transparency or environmental impact. TrustDots is designed to account for those differences.

The company evaluates brands and products across more than 30 factors and can surface the factors most relevant to the individual shopper. The underlying evidence does not change, but the way that information is weighted can. That means two people looking at the same product could ultimately evaluate its trustworthiness differently.

Following the Product Beyond the Label

During a demonstration of the platform, Dorlus used household products to show how TrustDots attempts to look beyond the name printed on the package.

A consumer might recognize a product by its brand name, but TrustDots can trace that product through the broader corporate ownership structure behind it. That matters because the company isn't only trying to understand what a product contains. It is attempting to understand the organization responsible for producing and selling it.

According to Dorlus, the company's data infrastructure currently tracks approximately 700 million products, with its AI-driven pipeline processing terabytes of information daily.

The platform combines publicly available information, purchased datasets and data partnerships. Dorlus said those partnerships include organizations such as the World Benchmarking Alliance.

TrustDots also allows companies to challenge information they believe is incorrect by submitting supporting evidence for review. Its public methodology states that brands cannot purchase higher scores or pay the company to suppress unfavorable information.

That separation is critical to the company's larger proposition. If TrustDots wants to become an authority on whether other companies can be trusted, consumers will first have to trust TrustDots itself.

The Consumer App May Only Be the Beginning

The more ambitious opportunity for TrustDots lies beyond the barcode scanner. Dorlus sees a future in which consumers don't simply ask TrustDots whether a product they have already found is trustworthy. Instead, an AI agent could help consumers determine what to buy in the first place.

Imagine telling an AI shopping agent: Find me a pair of running shoes under $150 from a company that aligns with my sustainability and labor-practice preferences.

Rather than forcing the consumer to independently research dozens of brands, the agent could understand the shopper's priorities, search available options, evaluate companies against those preferences and eventually help complete the purchase.

The distinction is significant.

Barcode scanning answers, “Should I buy this?”

Agentic shopping attempts to answer, “What should I buy?”

As AI companies race to develop agents capable of completing tasks and transactions for consumers, platforms like TrustDots could become part of the infrastructure those agents rely upon to make decisions.

Who Determines What We Should Trust?

Consumers increasingly question whether online reviews are authentic, whether influencers are being paid, whether product claims are accurate and whether retailers have an incentive to scrutinize products they profit from selling.

Artificial intelligence creates another layer of uncertainty: AI systems can summarize an enormous amount of information, but the quality of their answers still depends upon the quality of the underlying data.

TrustDots believes independent, inspectable evidence can help fill that gap. Its challenge will be proving that its own scoring methodology deserves the authority the company hopes to build around it.

For Dorlus and his team, however, the larger bet is about where commerce is headed next. Today, TrustDots can help a consumer investigate a product before clicking “Buy.” Tomorrow, the company wants to provide the intelligence that helps an AI agent decide what should be bought at all.

And as autonomous agents begin playing a larger role in commerce, one of the most valuable technologies in the transaction may not be the AI making the purchase, but the trust layer helping it decide.

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