Trust between people
TradeUp taught us how identity and evidence shape a high-consideration decision between strangers.
About Honestly
Product truth should be easier to find.
We are AI engineers and e-commerce operators building a verified database of what people actually think about products.
Our story
We learned to build trust before we learned to build Honestly.
Paolo Shamoon and Kalvin Kazemi are childhood friends and second-time founders. Their first company together was TradeUp, one of the largest Pokémon card and collectibles trading marketplaces.
TradeUp made one problem impossible to ignore: commerce depends on knowing what is real. Identity, context, provenance, and the words people use all matter when two strangers have to decide whether to trust a product or one another.
Honestly applies that lesson to a much larger information problem. Product opinions are scattered across videos, posts, communities, and reviews. We turn those fragments into structured evidence without erasing the person who said them.
Structure from messy data
We built systems that gather, connect, and make sense of information that does not arrive in a neat database.
Truth about products
Honestly gives teams a direct line from a decision back to the product opinion and public source behind it.
The team
Built by people who know the data and the decision.
Our backgrounds span AI data systems, design engineering, marketplaces, growth, and e-commerce.
Paolo Shamoon
CEOPaolo leads product, company strategy, and customer work. He built a luxury-goods resale business with over $1M in online sales and brings an investor’s discipline to deciding which questions are worth answering.
Kalvin Kazemi
CTOKalvin is a design engineer and AI data expert. He built large-scale scraping and proxy infrastructure and leads the systems that turn full posts, transcripts, and comments into source-linked product opinions.
Scott Davidson Jr.
GrowthScott leads growth, revenue, and go-to-market. A former founder, he first worked with Paolo at UCLA and now turns Honestly’s product intelligence into clear commercial decisions for customers.
How we work
The source is part of the answer.
A database of opinions is only useful if teams can understand what was said, who said it, and where it came from. We designed the company around that standard.
Read the full story.
A clipped keyword is not an opinion. Context from the post, video, transcript, and conversation changes what the words mean.
Keep the human attached.
Creators and customers are not data exhaust. Their public source, words, and role in the conversation remain visible.
Separate evidence from inference.
We label what the public record proves, what it suggests, and what still needs first-party data or human review.
End with a decision.
The work is not done when a chart is rendered. The evidence should help a team decide what to explain, fix, test, or fund next.
Make every product decision more honest.
We work with brands who want the truth about their products by listening to the humans behind every post.
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