Trust Exchange builds the European standard for backability.
Two questions decide whether a young company gets backed. What is it worth, and whether the people behind it can be trusted to build it. Across Europe both are answered by assertion. There is no independent way to measure either, and no shared language an answer could be read in.
We build that instrument, and we set that language.
Martin and Camille came at this from opposite sides of the same table.
Camille Accolas, co-founder.
Martin Studer, co-founder.
Camille Accolas, co-founder.
Camille spent a decade moving between founders and the people who fund them across Europe. She built the first venture programme for nature and biodiversity, taking it from an idea to 500 applications in 3 years, more than 20 teams supported, and over 1 million dollars into early-stage companies that had no established way to be valued.
Martin Studer, co-founder.
Martin spent 30 years on the side that decides. Senior roles at EY and Zurich Insurance Group, a CFA, and more than 400 board and committee meetings across industries. Long enough to know what a promise is worth before anyone has tested it, and how rarely the two match.
We work in opposite directions, and that is the point. Martin goes down. Analytical, starts from a blank page, and will have built the whole structure before anyone has agreed there is something to solve. Camille goes out. Detail-driven and action-first, takes an outline and makes it real enough to put in front of people. Vertical and horizontal. The standard needs both, because a method nobody adopts is a paper, and a network with no method behind it is a mailing list.
Neither of us could do this alone. That’s why we’re doing it together.
VALUATE™, our own methodology.
All assessments run on VALUATE. Trust Exchange holds the standard. It works in 3 layers.
1. What can be established
It takes your own material as it stands and runs it through the rules of the published framework. It checks it against a fixed set of test points, corrects what does not hold together, and establishes which methods the evidence has actually earned. Same inputs, same result, every time, with the working visible throughout.
Position, destination, gaps, route and arrival time. Then all of it recalculated whenever the evidence changes, at the pace the company actually moves rather than at the pace of the next raise.
We are carried by our values.
01
Human designed and machine augmented
Machines do the gathering, the checking and the arithmetic. People make the judgements that carry consequence, and carry the accountability.
02
Every assessment states its workings. A finding you cannot check is an opinion. We do not sell opinions.
03
Accountability and neutrality
The price stays fixed, whatever the result. The process is shared across more than one person by design.
