Miami-based founders Justin Elliott and Jahreem Samuels have scored an investment for their AI and blockchain-verified commerce platform.<\/p>\n
The pair\u2019s journeys brought them together, and they became united in business through shared pain points in their respective industries. Elliott explored mechanical engineering<\/a> while in high school, but in college, he shifted to marketing, maintaining an interest in web development, and eventually became the head of digital marketing and e-commerce for a jewelry company that launched several businesses.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always had my own businesses where I\u2019ve had to learn how to build websites, learn how to do the marketing, learn about SEO, so I\u2019ve always been on that side of things,\u201d Elliott told AFROTECH\u2122. \u201cI\u2019ve also been in music, so like engineering, technical side, and music has always been parallel in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n For 10 years, Elliott worked as a full-time DJ, touring globally, until the pandemic hit. At what felt like the height of his career, he no longer wanted a profession that required him to be physically present to make a living. He wanted to return to tech, and Samuels\u2019 cousin, who was a promoter working in same industry, told him about Samuels.<\/p>\n Samuels was a serial entrepreneur who started his first business in high school. At 17, he bought and sold automotive parts to kids at his school, and went on to open e-commerce websites using his skills in HTML and CSS. In 2019, he launched a new venture called Sneaker Buyers, based in Miami, which started selling sneakers out of a trunk and scaled to a storefront, achieving more than $10 million in sales.<\/p>\n \u201cMy job is to then take a look at the item, authenticate it, find a real-time valuation on how much this item is worth, and then inventory it into our system. So on a day-to-day basis, getting like 20 customers a day, it\u2019s really tedious. And I had to think to myself, \u2018How can I scale this?’\u201d Samuels mentioned.<\/p>\n Samuels struggled to find a single platform that could manage his sales, track valuations, and keep operations running smoothly. Elliott could relate to Samuels\u2019 challenges from his time working at a jewelry store, buying and selling luxury items such as Rolexes, Patek Philippes, and Cartiers. He would use eight different systems to move an item that people were selling.<\/p>\n A two-hour conversation with Samuels paved the way for the pair to develop a system that could deliver real-time valuations<\/a> for customer items, offer a customized inventory tool to track purchase details, and support item authentication.<\/p>\n \u201cMeeting Jareem two years ago, and he was still having the same problems. I was like, \u2018If this problem hasn\u2019t been solved since then, how can we figure out how to solve this problem?\u2019 Obviously, it\u2019s a problem still. And with advancements in technologies, it shouldn\u2019t be,\u201d Elliott said.<\/p>\n \u201cSo at the time he was using Shopify, and so I took the time, I was like, \u2018How can I make Shopify work with what he needs?\u2019 We did some research, and I was like, \u2018To customize Shopify to do what he needed, you might as well just build it from scratch,’\u201d Elliott continued.<\/p>\n This led to the inception of WRTH, a customizable AI-powered, blockchain<\/a>-verified, and certified e-commerce operating system launched in 2024. It claims to be the \u201cworld\u2019s first AI & blockchain-verified commerce platform,\u201d according to<\/a> the company\u2019s website.<\/p>\n WRTH understands commerce and can be tailored to support businesses in service, resale, fashion, brand operations, automotive, collectibles, and more. The platform has over 50 AI agents in 10 categories that can operate across more than 15 marketplaces and sales channels. The agents can be tasked with assessing pricing, valuing inventory, optimizing fulfillment, supporting customers, providing analytics insights, managing payment and fraud, syncing multiple channels, and more, according to information on its website.<\/p>\n Blockchain verification helps ensure items are authenticated. This can also ensure ownership of items and resolve fraud claims by linking a seller to their personal wallet.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re at the precipice of where AI<\/a> and blockchain is actually emerging in a way that makes sense \u2026 It\u2019s a lot of focus on tokenization of assets. That means taking the world\u2019s things and putting them on [blockchain] so that they have provenance,\u201d Elliott commented. \u201cYou can track the ownership of them, you can prove ownership of them, and then you can start to unlock the liquidity in these items and can move them faster with the records backing them. So that creates more trust, that creates more liquidity in the market, and it just creates an overall better way of people conducting business.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re building the infrastructure \u2026 so that every business, not just sneaker shops, but people in the service industry as well are equipped to be able to keep up with the trends, not get left behind, and also increase their revenue by taking advantage of the new ways that things are being done and just make business fair equitable and up to the times,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n AWS Investment<\/p>\n In October 2025, WRTH announced<\/a> on LinkedIn that it received a six-figure investment<\/a> from Amazon Web Services (AWS), made possible through its participation in the AWS Activate startup program. The investment was also accompanied by over $100,000 in credits. It will help the company scale globally and support a major client they secured that attracts more than 20 million monthly users to their site.<\/p>\n \u201cAWS powers about one-third of the internet and some of the biggest platforms. With where we\u2019re heading, we needed that infrastructure to scale \u2026 We\u2019re building out a custom marketplace solution for a client that gets over 20 million users to their site a month \u2026 We needed the infrastructure to be able to handle that kind of load,\u201d Elliot mentioned.<\/p>\n WRTH is currently in beta testing and plans to make its official debut on Dec. 3 ahead of Miami\u2019s Art Basel. The launch will also coincide with what they hope will mark the closing of their pre-seed round, which seeks to raise $2 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Miami-based founders Justin Elliott and Jahreem Samuels have scored an investment for their AI and blockchain-verified commerce platform.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[102649,102650,138,336,329,111,139,69,370,21969],"class_list":{"0":"post-154532","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-afrotech","9":"tag-black-community","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-entrepreneurship","12":"tag-investing","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-tech","17":"tag-wealth-building"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}