TAPP: FARM TO BUYER

I made it all the way to Google's stage on this. Then I walked away from the company anyway, a few months later.

• whatA two-sided marketplace connecting Kerala's rubber farmers directly to buyers, cutting out the middlemen.
• my partFounder and CEO. I ran the research, built the model, onboarded both sides, and pitched it.
• result2nd runner-up at Hult Prize San Francisco, with 20 farmers and 5 buyers live before the pitch, then a decision to shut it down.

Why rubber

I built TAPP with Othman Bdeir and Adarsh Matathil for the Hult Prize, 2024 to 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, so I'd been hearing about middlemen and unfair pricing at the dinner table long before I built a platform around it. 95% of Kerala's rubber farmers sell through middlemen and lose 20 to 50% of their earnings to unfair pricing. Buyers on the other end deal with constant price swings, inconsistent quality, and no way to trace where the rubber came from.

What was live before the pitch

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.

On top of that I modeled five years out, $75 to $100M in GMV by year five against a $40B+ global market and $10B+ in India. That number was a projection from my pitch model. I came 2nd runner-up at the Hult Prize San Francisco regional.

What the research changed

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'd 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. There's a hard number behind that: 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, and I couldn't see a version of it that held. I ended TAPP after college.

Now I check who controls a market before I design a company around it.