About SOTRU

Verification Should Never End

We're building infrastructure for continuously verified business relationships — where identity, communication, and transactions stay connected, even as the world around them changes.

Our Mission

Eliminate Fraud by Making Verification Continuous

The Problem We Solve

Right now, businesses verify vendors once, then rely on email trust forever. A bank account changes. An authorized signer turns over. An email gets compromised. But the verification doesn't update. Fraud happens in that gap.

Verification was never meant to be a one-time event. It should be ongoing, automatic, and woven into every transaction.

SOTRU fixes this by making verification live and continuous. Bank details change? We alert you. Authorized signers shift? We flag it. Emails get intercepted? We replace them with cryptographically verified communication. Fraud becomes structurally harder because identity is always verified.

Our Purpose

Businesses should never have to gamble on who they're dealing with. Trust should be verifiable, continuous, and structural — not an afterthought.

Why Now

Invoice fraud costs South African businesses billions annually. Payment diversion attacks are rising. Compliance regulations demand audit trails. The tools to prevent this exist — identity verification, encrypted communication, immutable logs. SOTRU connects them.

Our Story

How SOTRU Started

What began in early 2024 as an identity infrastructure innovation project evolved into something bigger. As we worked with enterprises on decentralized identity adoption, one pattern became impossible to ignore: organizations had robust identity verification technology, but it wasn't being used for the transactions that mattered most. Invoices still moved through email. Bank details were shared in PDFs. Verification happened once, then stopped.

We realized the gap wasn't a technology problem — it was an integration problem. Identity verification, secure communication, and transaction protection needed to be one system, not three separate tools bolted together.

So we started building SOTRU. Not as another verification product, but as infrastructure that makes verification continuous, communication secure, and transactions trustworthy by design.

Why This Matters

For Your Business

One prevented fraud incident typically pays for years of SOTRU. But the real value is structural: fraud becomes harder because identity is always verified. No more gambling on who sent that invoice.

For Your Industry

SOTRU isn't just a tool — it's infrastructure. It raises the baseline for trust across your entire industry. Competitors adopt it. Suppliers demand it. Compliance becomes simpler because verification is automatic.

For Digital Trust

We're building toward a world where digital business relationships are as verifiable as physical ones. Where identity is continuous, communication is cryptographic, and transactions are tamper-proof by design.

The SOTRU founding team has won awards from Industry Leaders

Discovery
Deloitte
KPMG
BDO
EY

Meet the Team

Built by People Who Understand the Problem

Hover a founder to reveal their story

Jack Scott-King

Jack Scott-King

Operations & Infrastructure

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Jack Scott-King

Operations & Infrastructure

Jack oversees infrastructure, system reliability, and operational strategy at SOTRU. He also serves as Co-Chair of the Decentralized Identity Foundation Africa Special Interest Group, shaping digital identity adoption across the continent. A UCT graduate in Information Technology, Jack co-founded SubjeX alongside Max, presented research at HAISA in Sweden (2024) after his cybersecurity paper was awarded best in the degree, and was part of the winning team at Discovery's National Hackathon (2023).

Co-Founder
Max Coleman

Max Coleman

Business Development & Strategy

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Max Coleman

Business Development & Strategy

Max leads business strategy, partnerships, and product direction at SOTRU. Before SOTRU, he co-founded SubjeX, an EdTech platform reaching 25,000+ students with backing from Deloitte and Vumatel, and led a blockchain project at UCT for the CSIR. He graduated top of his class from UCT with a BBS in Information Systems, won Discovery's National Hackathon (2023), and holds the BSG Award for Best IS Honours Student. He has published two peer-reviewed papers on AI and education.

Co-Founder
James Clark

James Clark

Technology & Product Engineering

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James Clark

Technology & Product Engineering

James is responsible for SOTRU's decentralised identity architecture and product engineering. His work focuses on agent-based communication using verifiable credentials and the DIDComm protocol. A UCT graduate in Information Systems, James published and presented research on decentralised identity at HAISA in Sweden (2024), and won first place at Discovery's National Hackathon (2023) and the Open Box Software Prize for top IS performance.

Co-Founder

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Stop Fraud Before It Costs You

One prevented fraud incident typically pays for years of SOTRU. Register your business and start verifying in minutes.

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