Trust before Truth

A conversational platform for life's biggest questions

Investor briefing · July 2026 · Confidential. Working title.View the app prototype →

The founding insight

Two billion people carry questions about faith they don't feel comfortable talking about. Does God exist? Did the resurrection happen? Why suffering?

Trust before Truth is the first AI built to answer them honestly: every claim cited, both sides argued, never preaching. The printing press gave people the text. This gives them the conversation.

Most rejections of Christianity are not intellectual. They are relational.

Trust is the product. Truth gets its honest hearing because of it.

The problem

Millions are asking. No human venue can answer well.

The questions haven't gone away. The trusted places to ask them have. 29% of US adults are now religiously unaffiliated, yet the unaffiliated are not settled unbelievers: only 36% report a complete absence of religious belief, while 37% sit between belief and unbelief, and a majority still believe in God, a higher power, or spiritual forces. 64% of nones cite questioning religion's teachings as a core reason they left. Globally, the unaffiliated number 1.9 billion.

29%

US adults religiously unaffiliated

37%

Of nones sit between belief and unbelief

1.9B

Unaffiliated worldwide

The human ceiling

Every existing option runs into the same wall: humans judge. It is part of the human condition. Even the most well-meaning pastor carries opinions about your money, your lifestyle, your doubts, and your attendance, and people feel it, however restrained it is. That quiet evaluation is precisely what kills honest exploration. In a 2025 US survey, fear of judgment outranked cost and access as the reason people avoid opening up to another person.

And even setting judgment aside, no single human can hold the case. Making the existence of God intellectually serious spans first-century history, textual criticism, cosmology, and moral philosophy. Pastors are not polymath scholars, and scholars are not pastors. The person who can cite the Roman records, engage the strongest atheist philosophers, and sit patiently with someone's grief at 2am does not exist. Until now, that combination has been structurally impossible.

The shame barrier

Modern life carries more baggage than it used to: addiction, pornography, substance abuse, search histories and social feeds people would be ashamed to show anyone. Many quietly assume Christians are pure and conclude: I'm too broken to walk into a church. The theology says the opposite, but a person carrying shame rarely stays long enough to hear it. Technology removes the moment of exposure entirely. There is no doorway to walk through, no face to read, no one watching. The person can just ask, and get a good answer.

The gap

There is no private, non-judgmental, academically serious space where someone can ask: did the resurrection actually happen? And receive the strongest case, the strongest counter-case, and an honest account of where scholars disagree, without being preached at, evaluated, or mocked.

The core mission

Break down every barrier to the first conversation. Invite it, honour it, build trust inside it. The rest will come.

Why now

People already trust AI with their deepest questions

#1 consumer AI use

Therapy and companionship (HBR, 2025)

48.7%

of AI users with mental-health challenges use LLMs for support (APA, 2025)

1 in 3 teens

chose AI over a human for a serious conversation (Common Sense, 2025)

Four firsts, simultaneously true: Digitized scholarship Instant cross-referencing Long-form dialogue at scale Tone adaptation

The access advantage

AI meets you where you are, whenever you are, however you are.

Church is one hour a week, often at 8am. The biggest questions arrive at 2am, mid-commute, after a diagnosis.

On 24/7 Zero fatigue Zero judgment Complete consistency Resumable anytime Multilingual

AI meets you where you are, whenever you are, however you are.

The Gutenberg moment

Reading gave people the text. Conversation gives them understanding.

Nothing between Luther and large language models has offered that.

The product in action

Compassion. Restraint. Rigour.

Compassion for the damaged

Vulnerability slows the pace. Harm is named honestly. No argument until trust exists.

Restraint for the antagonist

Agrees before arguing. One argument at a time. Concedes strong points.

Rigour for the sharp

Meets Bayesian reasoning in kind. Cites both sides. Labels every certainty tier.

Try it yourself

Have the conversation on your own phone or desktop. No signup, anonymous by default.

Open the live prototype →

Trust before Truth

Spar

Religion is obviously myth. Dead people stay dead. This is settled biology.

You're right, dead people stay dead. And I'll tell you something else: a resurrection is hard to believe. Even lifelong Christians wrestle with it. So let's set belief aside and just look at what happened around that tomb. Shall we?

Go on then.

Before anyone claims a sighting, there's the tomb itself. Sealed with a stone that took several men to move. Guarded by Roman soldiers who could be executed for failing. Days later it's empty, in the one city where showing the body would have ended everything. Rome and the temple leaders wanted this story gone. All they had to do was produce a corpse. They never did. I've always found that curious. Haven't you?

Go deeper

Challenge me

Change topic

Push back...

↑

Sim 2 · The invited spar · gold underlines are tap-to-cite

The structural backbone

A truth taxonomy the system cannot break

Every claim is tiered by certainty, with enforced speaking rules. Any historical claim without a citation is rejected before the user sees it: no source, no claim.

Tier	What it is	How it speaks
T1	Common fact	Confident and brief
T2	Scholarly consensus	"Most historians agree." Citation required
T3	Probable inference	Strongest case, strongest counter. Never upgraded to "true"
T4	Metaphysical question	Humble, philosophy named as philosophy
T5	Faith commitment	Pastoral, non-coercive, agency with the user

The corpus pairs Christian and skeptical scholarship on every contested topic, weighted toward sources outside the Bible.

How the model is built

Six steps to a trustworthy voice

1

Foundation

A leading open-weight model. No dependence on Big Tech APIs.

2

Knowledge

Third-party historical sources first: Tacitus, Josephus, archaeology, scholarship for and against.

3

Conversation training

Refined on real conversations with 800 to 1,000 beta users across belief backgrounds.

4

Refinement

Tuned against blind-tester ratings for honesty, warmth, and simplicity.

5

Guardrails

Untrained territory is fenced off, and the system says so plainly.

6

Beta launch

Public pilot with citations, certainty tiers, and tone discipline live.

Knowledge is retrieved and cited, behaviour is trained.

The library

What the system draws from

Primary ancient texts

Hebrew Bible, Greek NT, Dead Sea Scrolls, early church writings.

Non-Christian witnesses

Tacitus, Josephus, Pliny, Lucian. Records with no stake in the claim.

Scholarship, both sides

Wright and Bauckham paired with Ehrman and Ludemann.

Science and origins

Cosmology, fine-tuning, consciousness. Mainstream secular publications.

Philosophy of religion

Aquinas and Plantinga alongside Oppy and Mackie.

Skeptical frameworks

New Atheism, mythicism, critiques of religious harm, on purpose.

Even the machine can't rule it out

Press a general-purpose AI on the resurrection and it won't grant the miracle, but it concedes the hardest datum: people do not die for a story they know they invented. That is exactly the conversation this platform is built to have.

Audience, in priority order

The beachhead is the middle, not the poles

Priority one: the agnostics and the hurt. The dropped-off, the deconstructing, the people who lost trust in others. Largest segment, most reachable, and the ones fear of judgment silences most. Their door-opener: if Jesus was betrayed by his own friends and family, what chance do the rest of us have? Priority two: the skeptics, the credibility audience whose respect validates the platform. Priority three: believers and their leaders, the grounding and referral audience.

1 · Beachhead

Agnostics, the dropped-off, the hurt

Largest, most reachable, no identity stake in unbelief. Their hook: "If Jesus was betrayed by his own friends, what chance do the rest of us have?"

2 · Credibility

Atheists

If the fairest engagement they've had comes from this platform, the platform's honesty is proven.

3 · Grounding

Believers

Deeper grounding for the real conversations they are already having.

800M+ weekly AI users → 1.9B unaffiliated → tens of millions of active seekers

Early-stage explorer Deconstructing believer Curious skeptic Antagonistic atheist Practicing believer Pastor / chaplain / educator

Model and distribution

Mission-locked. Churches first, then the coffee cart.

A not-for-profit foundation, donation-supported. No engagement loops, no gamification, no conversion metrics. Pastors and chaplains seed the first users; then generosity goes physical.

The free coffee cart

Genuinely free coffee, a QR code on the cup: "Take a sip and get answers to life's biggest questions." No preaching, no pitch. The anti-pitch is the platform's promise made physical, and the cart is a kit any community can replicate.

Roadmap and use of funds

Twelve months to public pilot: A$2.285M

Realistic, not cheap: a permanent engineering team, dedicated security, paid beta cohorts of 800 to 1,000 testers, office, international legal, Swiss governance.

Engineering, full-time (2x ML/backend, 1x frontend)	700,000
Global research and filmed interviews	250,000
Marketing and distribution (incl. first two coffee carts)	250,000
Security engineer (dedicated)	180,000
Paid beta tester program	150,000
Operations, legal, infrastructure, governance, corpus, advisory, brand	510,000
Contingency (~12%)	245,000
Year one total	A$2,285,000

Founder takes no salary. Every dollar builds the product.

Five-year outlook

Costs compound. So does the supporter base.

Development spend does not decrease as the platform grows. Supporter uptake is modelled deliberately slowly at A$10 per month.

Year	Supporters	Revenue	Costs	Donor funding
1	0 (build)	A$0	A$2.3M	A$2.3M
2	2,000	A$0.24M	A$2.6M	A$2.4M
3	8,000	A$0.96M	A$3.2M	A$2.2M
4	18,000	A$2.16M	A$3.8M	A$1.6M
5	35,000	A$4.2M	A$4.2M	Break-even

For single-window philanthropy funds: a five-year upfront commitment of A$9M carries the platform to permanent self-sufficiency.

Most users will never pay, by design: the product is free, and A$10/month is an average across supporters, some giving less, many giving more. The benchmark is real: BibleProject runs a US$28.7M budget on 50,000+ patrons drawn from an audience in the tens of millions, roughly 0.2% conversion at an average near US$48 per patron per month. Our break-even of 35,000 supporters matches their proven patron base; because this product is one-to-one rather than broadcast, even a 1% conversion implies reaching it at around 3.5 million total users. For philanthropy funds that deploy in single windows, such as Yajilarra Trust, one five-year commitment of A$9M carries the platform to permanent self-sufficiency. And the coffee cart pays its own way: with volunteer staffing, roughly 29% of cups paid covers 100% of cups served.

The founder

Brad Moran

Co-founded CitrusAd, scaled it globally, acquired by Publicis Groupe in 2021 for A$205M. Former AFL player. Principal, Rocketship Advisory.

The pattern: take a category that doesn't exist, build its infrastructure, scale it internationally. Applied here to the most consequential category there is. Takes no salary.

Why I'm building this. I've spent my life running due diligence. On companies. On founders. On claims that sounded too good to be true. Then I turned the process on the biggest claim ever made.

I demanded evidence. I read the hostile witnesses first. I hunted for the better explanation the way an investor hunts for the flaw in a pitch, because there is always a flaw.

Ten years. A library of both sides. I never found it. What I found was not certainty. It was something rarer: a claim that got stronger the harder I attacked it. My conclusion wasn't faith as I'd understood the word. It was a verdict: there is no better explanation on the table. So why not this one?

That journey cost me a decade. This compresses it into one conversation, at 2am, with no one watching and no one selling. I'm building the tool I wish existed the night I started asking.

And a commitment: success is measured in fairness scores from skeptics, never in conversions. The system is architecturally forbidden from optimising for belief.

A$9M over five years, or A$2.3M year one

One commitment carries the platform all the way to self-sufficiency. The success metric:

"I still don't believe it, but that was the fairest engagement I've ever had with this question."

TRUST BEFORE TRUTH · INVESTOR BRIEFING · JULY 2026 · CONFIDENTIAL