Miami-Based Founders Score Six-Figure Investment From AWS For ‘The World’s First AI & Blockchain-Verified Commerce Platform’ – AfroTech

Miami-based founders Justin Elliott and Jahreem Samuels have scored an investment for their AI and blockchain-verified commerce platform.

The pair’s journeys brought them together, and they became united in business through shared pain points in their respective industries. Elliott explored mechanical engineering 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.

“I’ve always had my own businesses where I’ve had to learn how to build websites, learn how to do the marketing, learn about SEO, so I’ve always been on that side of things,” Elliott told AFROTECH™. “I’ve also been in music, so like engineering, technical side, and music has always been parallel in my life.”

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’ cousin, who was a promoter working in same industry, told him about Samuels.

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.

“My 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’s really tedious. And I had to think to myself, ‘How can I scale this?’” Samuels mentioned.

Samuels struggled to find a single platform that could manage his sales, track valuations, and keep operations running smoothly. Elliott could relate to Samuels’ 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.

A two-hour conversation with Samuels paved the way for the pair to develop a system that could deliver real-time valuations for customer items, offer a customized inventory tool to track purchase details, and support item authentication.

“Meeting Jareem two years ago, and he was still having the same problems. I was like, ‘If this problem hasn’t been solved since then, how can we figure out how to solve this problem?’ Obviously, it’s a problem still. And with advancements in technologies, it shouldn’t be,” Elliott said.

“So at the time he was using Shopify, and so I took the time, I was like, ‘How can I make Shopify work with what he needs?’ We did some research, and I was like, ‘To customize Shopify to do what he needed, you might as well just build it from scratch,’” Elliott continued.

This led to the inception of WRTH, a customizable AI-powered, blockchain-verified, and certified e-commerce operating system launched in 2024. It claims to be the “world’s first AI & blockchain-verified commerce platform,” according to the company’s website.

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.

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. 

“We’re at the precipice of where AI and blockchain is actually emerging in a way that makes sense … It’s a lot of focus on tokenization of assets. That means taking the world’s things and putting them on [blockchain] so that they have provenance,” Elliott commented. “You 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.”

“We’re building the infrastructure … 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,” he added.

AWS Investment

In October 2025, WRTH announced on LinkedIn that it received a six-figure investment 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.

“AWS powers about one-third of the internet and some of the biggest platforms. With where we’re heading, we needed that infrastructure to scale … We’re building out a custom marketplace solution for a client that gets over 20 million users to their site a month … We needed the infrastructure to be able to handle that kind of load,” Elliot mentioned.

WRTH is currently in beta testing and plans to make its official debut on Dec. 3 ahead of Miami’s 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.