This is the founding post. Every company's first blog post is a founding post. Ours happens to be true.
The short version
We run an import/export business. We lost a meaningful sum to a fraudulent incense supplier. The verification process we wished we'd done existed — but as a dozen different websites, manual checks, and phone calls that took half a day per supplier. We got tired of doing it by hand. We built Vetrade so we'd never have to again.
Then we realised every trader we knew had a version of the same story. So we made Vetrade available to them.
The longer version
I run Unceasing Impex, a trading firm that imports and exports incense sticks and pooja items. A few years in, we got caught by a supplier who looked legitimate on every surface check — clean website, GST number, samples that matched the RFQ spec. Everything underneath was manufactured. Two-month-old GST registration. No real B2B platform history. Stock-photo factory images. A WhatsApp "owner" who turned out to be renting the WhatsApp number from someone else.
Forty percent advance paid. Production "happened." Container shipped. Our US buyer opened it to find goods that didn't match the sample. The direct loss was around ₹4 lakh. The reputational loss — our buyer reducing orders with us for 18 months afterwards — was many multiples of that.
After that, we built an internal checklist. Every new supplier got verified before any advance:
- GST registration date + filing history
- IEC status if they claimed export experience
- Cross-check on IndiaMART, TradeIndia, Alibaba, JustDial — consistency of listings, account age, review history
- LinkedIn presence of the proprietor
- News and fraud scan — complaints, chargebacks, court cases
- Reference calls with prior customers
It took half a day per supplier. It worked — we never got burned again. But it was miserable.
The decision
One weekend I was running the checklist on a new factory and thought: this should be a button. Not because I'm lazy, but because every trader in India should have access to this, not just the ones who have the time and skepticism to do it manually.
I spent the next few months building the first version. I used it on our own sourcing first — which is, honestly, still the most important testing environment for Vetrade. If it doesn't catch issues before we wire money, it's not good enough.
Then I showed it to a few trader friends. Their reaction was what convinced me to make it public: "Where has this been?"
What Vetrade does today
Vetrade runs the full checklist in a single report:
- IEC verification — current status and export history signal
- GST verification — registration details, filing consistency, flags on registration date
- Google Places matching — strict name matching to avoid false positives
- News fraud scan — targeted news search excluding generic info aggregators
- B2B platform detection — IndiaMART, TradeIndia, Alibaba, JustDial
- LinkedIn presence check — via targeted site search
- SSL and web presence — auto-detection of a real business footprint
The output is a verification report with flags. Missing data isn't treated as a negative — we don't penalise genuinely small businesses for not having a LinkedIn. We surface "verification gaps" instead of raw scores, because the person reading the report should make the judgement call, not a number.
What's on the roadmap
Without over-committing: we're working on WhatsApp-native delivery, deeper integration for common buyer-verification use cases (it's not just about suppliers — Indian exporters get scammed by fake foreign buyers too), and a handful of trade-finance-adjacent tools we're still scoping.
Vetrade is the first Semperworks product. There will be more.
The principle behind this
Software for Indian traders shouldn't be built by people who've never run an Indian trade. Every design decision in Vetrade — treating missing data as neutral instead of negative, using "verification gaps" instead of numerical scores, WhatsApp-first auth, keeping the report readable by someone whose first language isn't English — comes from running a trading business ourselves and watching what actually matters when you're about to wire ₹10 lakh to a supplier you've never met.
That's what Semperworks is. That's what every product we ship will be.
Try Vetrade: vetrade.unceasingimpex.com. First three verifications are free. Feedback welcome — we read every email at support@semperworks.com.