Sealr — a secure workspace for commodity brokers

The problem

International commodity trade — crude oil, sugar, coffee, copper, metals — doesn't run on platforms. It runs on trusted relationships between brokers, buyers and sellers, documented in NDAs, IMFPAs (International Master Fee Protection Agreements) and commission agreements that look different on every single deal.

What all those deals share is that they live in fragments. NDAs in separate PDFs per party. A WhatsApp group for one deal, email for the next, a shared Dropbox for the third. Commission splits in Excel sheets nobody updates. When a deal closes there's no audit trail showing who agreed to what in which phase. When a deal falls — which happens more often than brokers care to admit — there's nowhere to gather the loose ends.

Sealr's question wasn't "build us a CRM." It was: build a workspace where every deal, with all its confidential parties, gets sealed from the first message to the signed contract.

Approach

The platform was built around four primitives:

1. Discussion Rooms — NDA-protected conversations with multiple parties. Each discussion room is a sealed conversation where only invited dealmakers can read and reply. No DMs "accidentally" routed to the wrong party. No WhatsApp trail nobody can reconstruct later.
2. Dealing Rooms — structured deal management from first contact to signed contract. Per deal: the phase, the parties involved, the documents, the status. One workspace, not eight.
3. IMFPA Generation — auto-generate International Master Fee Protection Agreements from your deal data. No templates being hand-edited every time, with a fresh error slipping in on every new deal. Built-in contract creation, fed by structured data in the dealing room.
4. Commission Tracking — broker commissions defined upfront and tracked per deal. Transparent, dispute-free, legally documented from day one.

On top of those four sits an iOS app (Expo SDK 55) that provides full platform access from your iPhone — because brokers are on the road more often than at a desktop, and because a deal closed in the back of an Uber needs to be just as valid as one closed in an Amstelveen office.

Tech stack

Next.js 16 for the web. Supabase for data + auth + RLS. Mollie for the €9.95-per-workspace-per-month subscription billing. Expo SDK 55 for the iOS app, sharing TypeScript types with the web so NDA-and-deal state has one source of truth. Resend for transactional mail (invitations, signed-NDA confirmations, deal-status updates). End-to-end document encryption via Supabase Storage with server-managed keys.

The choice of one shared Supabase Postgres over a microservice sprawl is deliberate: brokers have zero appetite for eventual consistency between "who's in my dealing room" and "what's in the IMFPA." A deal is either signed or it isn't.

War story

Early in the private beta, a Rotterdam broker was negotiating the same lot of Malaysian palm oil with nine buyers at the same time. Nine separate NDAs. Nine separate price proposals. One lot.

The interface we'd built assumed, the way software does, that a broker has one deal at a time in focus. The broker showed us that wasn't right — he had all nine open in parallel, as a matrix in his head, and within five minutes he needed to know which buyer had seen which price and which NDA version sat underneath.

The solution wasn't a redesign. It was a deals-matrix view: one dealing room per buyer, but stacked above each other in a grid where the broker could see, per column, the status of every parallel conversation. A feature that never showed up on the MVP sheet, but one that made the difference between workable and usable in production.

Lesson: building for brokers means building for people who don't think in flowcharts, they think in stacks. Give them the stack.

Result

Sealr is live on web and in the App Store. The plan is €9.95 per workspace per month after a 30-day free trial — no credit card required for the trial. The positioning is deliberately narrow: brokers, buyers and sellers in international commodity trade. Not "all B2B contract flow," not "all commodity platforms." One niche, understood deeply.

GDPR-compliant from day one, hosted in the EU (Vercel + Supabase), with audit trails on every signed agreement.

What I learned

For a trust-based business, "we encrypt everything" is the floor, not the feature. The actual feature is that a broker can explain to a new buyer why his data is safe in the tone his own risk officer uses. To get there you don't write brand-aware crypto paperwork in marketing copy — you make sure every security claim in the product has a doc link backing it up.

A niche of a niche is a real niche. "B2B SaaS for commodity trade" was too narrow for venture money ten years ago and is exactly narrow enough today for a €9.95-per-workspace-per-month model that doesn't need an acquisition machine around it. Users find you via one of the nine buyers in the same dealing room.

CTA

Building a platform for a high-trust, contract-heavy B2B trade — financial, legal, commodities? Send me a note. I'll explain why human-on-the-other-side and encryption-at-rest aren't contradictory requirements.