Built by someone who fixed dents
before he wrote code.

Not every founder comes from Silicon Valley. Not every great platform is born in a boardroom. This one started in a panel shop in Cape Town.

Jarrit Hosking grew up around the smell of paint and the sound of metal being straightened. His family ran Lance's Panel and Spray — now International Panel Shop — and like most kids who grow up in a family business, he learned everything without realising he was learning anything. His father taught him the trade. His mother taught him the books. The workshop taught him how the working world actually operates — not in theory, but in grease and invoices and difficult customers and days when nothing goes right.

He fixed dented panels. He sorted rust repairs. He was twenty-one, fascinated by technology, and had no idea where to start.

A three-month stint with The Stunt Co. as a production hand on Fear Factor India — because when you're young and curious, you say yes to things that don't make sense yet. A trip to China in 2018 to teach English as a foreign language, because the world is large and the best education rarely happens in a classroom. Back to Cape Town. Back to the workshop. Panels and paint and the slow accumulation of a life that hadn't quite found its shape yet.

When lockdown closes one door

His mother had started a buying and selling business called Bring and Buy, and handed it to Jarrit to run as his own. He threw himself into it. Then lockdown hit, and like most small businesses that depended on foot traffic and physical exchange, it didn't survive.

Most things didn't. But something shifted. In the wreckage of that period, Jarrit started building websites. Fixing computers. A business called Prinymity. Small work, honest work, the kind that teaches you more than it pays.

Then he discovered AI.

Not in a conference. Not in a course. In the way most self-taught builders discover things — by sitting with it, breaking it, building something, and realising the ceiling had just been removed.

From dents to diagnostics

The first real thing he built was Aurora Repair — a web application that assessed vehicle damage from photos and returned a three-tier repair estimate. A panel beater's son using AI to solve a panel beater's problem. The kind of idea that only makes sense in hindsight.

More tools followed. And then something unexpected: security research. Jarrit joined HackerOne, YesWeHack, Intigriti and BugCrowd — the platforms where ethical hackers responsibly report vulnerabilities in major companies' systems. He found bugs. He reported them. He learned, from the inside, how digital platforms fail the people who trust them — and how to make sure the things he built wouldn't.

Forge Vertical came next. His own agency. His own name on the door. The work was serious — high-performance web architecture, AI integration, security research. The kind of foundation you build before you build something bigger.

The commission that started it all

The idea for TripSpace Global wasn't abstract. It was personal.

Jarrit and his wife — they married on 22 March 2025, the photograph above is from that day — travel often. With family. And they kept running into the same conversation wherever they went: property owners, hosts, people who had built something beautiful and were inviting strangers to share it, quietly frustrated by the percentage that disappeared from every booking.

Not a small percentage. Not a reasonable toll for access to a marketplace. Fifteen, eighteen, twenty-five percent — gone, every time, to a platform that had done none of the work of building the place, cleaning the rooms, or making the guest feel welcome.

So he built the alternative.

TripSpace Global launched on a single principle: zero commission. Hosts pay a flat monthly fee and keep every rand a guest pays them. No percentage. No exceptions. No platform quietly profiting more from a booking than the person who made the bed.

Tools built from real pain points

But the commission model was only the beginning. Because Jarrit had spent years thinking about what travellers actually need — not what platforms assume they need, but what genuinely goes wrong on the road.

Every feature came from a real problem. Not a roadmap exercise. A conversation. A moment of frustration. A gap that no major platform had bothered to close.

Security built in, not bolted on

AI is built into every layer of TripSpace Global — not as a novelty, not as a feature to announce in a press release, but as infrastructure. Carefully considered. Tested rigorously. And secured by someone who spends his own time finding the holes in other platforms before anyone else does.

While others considered AI something to be afraid of, Jarrit worked alongside it — building tools that address real pain points for travellers and hosts alike, while ensuring the platform itself is one of the most security-conscious in the travel space.

TripSpace Global is what happens when someone who understands the real world — the workshop, the travel, the frustration, the cost — decides to fix it.

The listings are growing. The Play Store submission is pending. The first partnerships are forming. The story is still early.

But the foundation is right. And in this industry, that turns out to be everything.