Got 20 farmers and 5 buyers onto a rubber marketplace before I ever pitched it.

I built TAPP with Othman Bdeir and Adarsh Matathil for the Hult Prize, 2024 into 2025. Adarsh and I both grew up in Kerala, home to 85% of India's rubber, and my grandfather led a Rubber Producing Society there before me. I had been hearing about middlemen and unfair pricing at the dinner table long before I built a platform around it.

Buyers on the other end of the same trade deal with constant price swings, inconsistent quality, and no way to trace where the rubber came from. Both sides lose to the same gap, which is what makes it a marketplace problem rather than a pricing complaint.

I talked to the farmers and the buyers myself, then built the thing they described. By the time I stood up to pitch, both sides were already running:

• 20 farmers and 5 buyers onboarded, with real conversations happening.
• Escrow-secured payments live through RazorpayX.
• Logistics integrated through Porter 3PL.
• Digital listing and AI grading on the farmer side, buyer matching and traceable sourcing on the buyer side.
• Ongoing talks with the Rubber Board of India.

I built the financial model behind the pitch as well, the unit economics and the growth case, and took it to the Hult Prize with the rest of it. I came 2nd runner-up at the San Francisco regional.

Off the back of that pitch, we were invited to Google to present TAPP.

I kept digging after the pitch. I got on calls with a rubber trader and a Rubber Board official, on top of the farmers I had already spoken to, and found that five or six major tyre makers with deep ties to the government control the trade, close to a cartel.

In 2022 the Competition Commission of India fined India's top tyre makers ₹1,788 crore, about $216M, for coordinating prices on raw rubber. A platform whose whole premise was cutting the middlemen out would have had to take that structure on directly.

TAPP got further than most student companies do. Both sides of the market were live, the payments and logistics were integrated, and it placed at the Hult Prize regional. What it never had was an answer to who actually sets the price of rubber in Kerala.

This is the project that taught me how complicated real work gets once it leaves the deck. Farmers, buyers, traders, the Rubber Board and the tyre makers all wanted different things from the same trade, and I only understood the shape of it after I had sat with each of them separately. Holding those perspectives at once, and knowing what is actually happening on the ground rather than what the market size says, is the part I took with me.