Founded in 2026. We are starting with palm oil, edible fats, and processed agri, and expanding only where we can maintain citation-grade coverage. We intend to stay narrow until the catalogue is unimpeachable.
I grew up around commodity trading. Two family businesses: cashew, sesame and spices moving out of India; palm oil moving out of Southeast Asia. The rhythm of the work was familiar to me long before I understood any of it: shipment bookings, broker calls, letters of credit, the quiet tension around a rate that moved the wrong way in the wrong week.
In the summer of 2023 I sat on a procurement desk for the first time with real attention. The desk was busy. The broker picked the same preferential agreement he had been using for years. Nobody on the desk had read the current rate schedule. The rate book on the shared drive was two years old. The head of procurement told me, in a tone halfway between resignation and amusement, that the rate book was “always slightly wrong, and we just absorb it.”
That number, what they were absorbing, worked out to several hundred thousand US dollars a year on a single commodity, on a single corridor.
I went back to university that autumn and started reading trade agreements. Not all of them, but enough to understand why the rate book kept drifting. The rate book was not difficult to maintain. It was simply nobody's job.
Palisade is the company that exists because nobody has bothered to make the rate book correct, queryable, and continuously updated. It is not a glamorous problem. It is a real one.
— Vansh Bagaria, founder. Singapore, January 2026.
We started with palm oil, edible fats, and processed agri because that's the corridor I know. We will not add a vertical until the existing catalogue is provably better than every alternative.
Every rate in Palisade ships with a gazette reference, a publication date, and a versioned diff. If you can't show your work, you don't get to call it intelligence.
Brokers and freight forwarders do critical operational work. We surface the analytical layer they don't have time for. Their workflow doesn't change; their numbers get better.
We list the FTAs we cover, the lines we cover, and the lines we don't. If your shipment is out of scope, we say so before you sign anything.
Economics and cognitive science at the University of Chicago (BA, 2028). Grew up between two family agri-trading firms, one in South Asia and one in Southeast Asia, and built Palisade because the problem it solves has been in front of me for most of my life.
I'm hiring carefully for the 2026 cohort: one trade-data engineer and one founding account lead. If that sounds like you, write to vansh@palisadetrade.com.
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