The Development Journey of Proqure

How we're building trust infrastructure for India's steel trade

Where Proqure Really Began

We're Abhishek and Ashish Bansal, brothers who've spent our entire careers in steel pipe trade — 30 and 28 years respectively. We've traded pipes, built supplier networks, extended credit, dealt with defaults, and closed thousands of deals. We didn't study this market from the outside. We lived it.

Proqure did not begin as a software idea.
It began as a market observation.

In the Indian steel trade, demand and supply are not the problem. Trust, visibility, and structure are.

Buyers struggle to find the right suppliers for very specific requirements. Suppliers struggle to find credible buyers and price demand accurately. Most transactions still rely on phone calls, WhatsApp, and personal relationships — systems that do not scale and do not retain memory.

Steel trade is not broken because it lacks platforms. It is broken because it lacks structured trust and specification clarity.

The First Principle: Organize, Don't Disrupt

The early temptation was to think in familiar software terms:

  • A generic procurement tool
  • A listing or lead-generation platform
  • A payments or escrow-based solution

Each of these was consciously rejected.

A generic procurement OS would ignore how steel is actually traded. A lead platform would recreate the noise problem. An escrow or fintech approach would distort natural credit behaviour and shift responsibility away from market participants.

The decision was made early:

Proqure would not replace how steel trade works.
It would organize it.

That decision shaped everything that followed.

Starting Narrow: Why Pipes

Rather than starting broad, Proqure deliberately narrowed its focus.

Steel pipes were chosen as the first category because they represent:

  • High repeat frequency
  • Complex specifications
  • Routine trade credit (5–30 days)
  • High dispute potential if specs are unclear

This made pipes the perfect laboratory for building trust infrastructure.

The goal was not to capture the entire steel market quickly, but to solve one segment properly.

Specification as Foundation

One of the earliest and most important product decisions was how RFQs would be created.

In real steel trade, buyers don't think in abstract SKUs. They think in material, shape, size, thickness, standards, finish, and quantity units.

So Proqure's RFQ structure was designed to mirror real trade language:

  • Material (Black / GI / GP)
  • Shape (Round / SHS / RHS)
  • Brand
  • Size & thickness
  • BIS specification
  • Quantity (MT / Meter / PCS / KG)
  • Length, pipe end, surface finish

This was a foundational moment.

Once specifications are structured correctly:

  • Matching becomes meaningful
  • Negotiation becomes cleaner
  • Disputes reduce naturally

This alone differentiated Proqure from discovery-only platforms.

The Hardest Problem: Trust

As development progressed, one problem stood above all others:

How do buyers and suppliers trust each other without the platform becoming a financial intermediary?

What struck us was this: Nothing was fundamentally broken — it was just informal.

Steel trade worked on trust, but that trust lived only in people's heads. Once a relationship broke, there was no memory. Once a trader moved on, the history disappeared.

This led to Proqure's most important design decision:

Trust would be behavioural, not financial.

Instead of:

  • Escrow
  • Guarantees
  • Underwriting
  • Acting as an NBFC

Proqure would:

  • Record behaviour
  • Preserve history
  • Make reputation visible
  • Let consequences shape future access

This became the spine of the platform.

The Proqure Trust Index

From this thinking emerged the Proqure Trust Index — not as a credit score, but as a behavioural reputation system.

Trust would be built from:

  • Payment discipline
  • Fulfilment accuracy
  • Dispute behaviour
  • Consistency over time

Critically:

  • Trust would be contextual, not absolute
  • Exposure would be progressive, not binary

This mirrored how real traders think and operate offline.

What Proqure Is Becoming

Today, Proqure is evolving into something larger than software:

  • A market memory for steel trade
  • A trust infrastructure layer
  • A price discovery and demand-supply intelligence system

As categories expand from pipes into other steel products, the same trust logic applies.

The technology will evolve.
The interfaces will improve.
The categories will expand.

But the core philosophy will remain unchanged.

The Founders' Intent

Proqure is being built with patience and discipline.

Not to disrupt steel trade —
but to organize it.

Not to remove risk —
but to make it visible and manageable.

Not to chase speed —
but to build something durable.

Good markets don't eliminate risk.
They reward good behaviour and remember bad behaviour.

Proqure exists to bring that logic into the digital age of steel trade.

Join Us in Building Better Market Infrastructure

We're working with early partners who understand that good platforms are built with discipline, not speed.

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