I have known that Pin.tt is not a local company for years. I watched it grow. I watched it embed itself into how Trinidadians buy, sell, and move goods. I watched local competitors fold trying to compete with it. And I kept waiting for someone to say it publicly.
Nobody did.
I need to be transparent about something before we go further. I built TriniSpace. I operate in this digital space, and Pin.tt is, in a sense, a competitor. Which is exactly why I stayed quiet for so long. I did not want this to be read as jealousy or a local developer crying foul because a foreign company came in and took market share. I knew how it would look. So I said nothing. And my silence, along with everyone else’s, allowed them to go unchecked for years, until the deception became so embedded that artificial intelligence now repeats it as established fact.
That is what finally made me write this.
I also stopped trusting local media to cover stories like this a long time ago. And this story explains why. It is now an open secret in local industry circles that before Pin.tt launched in Trinidad, Larixon Classifieds approached several local companies to handle their market entry, eventually landing on Rostant Advertising to manage their local operations and give the platform its Trinidadian footing. According to a source with direct knowledge of those approaches, media outlets were among those contacted. They had the information. The story never ran. Whether that was oversight or a deliberate choice, I cannot say. What I can say is that the silence from every direction, including mine, had a cost.
When AI Gets It Wrong
Recently, while researching local platforms for an article, out of curiosity about the effectiveness of AI, I ran a simple query on Perplexity AI: “Is Pin.tt a local Trinidad and Tobago company or brand?”
Confident. Detailed. Completely wrong.
Then I pushed further. I asked: “Who founded Pin.tt?”
This time, it named the parent company correctly, Larixon Classifieds Ltd, but called them a Trinidad and Tobago-based company. That is factually, verifiably false. Larixon’s own website, their LinkedIn profile, their Crunchbase listing, their investor announcements, and every piece of industry coverage written about them confirm the same thing: they are incorporated in Nicosia, Cyprus, founded by Russian entrepreneurs.
AI did not invent this confusion. It learned it. Because the deception ran long enough and went unchallenged publicly for long enough, it became the assumed truth, absorbed into the information ecosystem and repeated with confidence.
So let’s correct it. Properly. With receipts.
Who Actually Owns Pin.tt
Pin.tt is owned and operated by Larixon Classifieds, a holding company founded in 2015, legally headquartered in Nicosia, Cyprus, and built by entrepreneurs with deep roots in the Russian internet industry.
The CEO and co-founder is Evgeny Ostrovsky, who previously co-founded the Larixon Jobs Network in Russia in 2006, and co-founded Holding66, a Russian media, classifieds, and e-commerce operation, between 2008 and 2015. His co-founders, Andrey Dobrynin and Sergey Amirov, share the same background.
Their business model is not complicated: find small, developing internet markets where no dominant classifieds platform exists, acquire the country-code domain, build or deploy a classifieds platform, and establish market leadership before any local competitor can get traction. They have executed this strategy in Mongolia, Tajikistan, Cyprus, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica.
In October 2024, they secured investment from Zubr Capital, a Belarus-founded private equity fund. Their stated investment priorities at that point included building out financial accounting, creating a corporate strategy, and restructuring the company group. For a business reporting US$10.4 million in 2025 revenue across five markets and a 33% compound annual growth rate over five years, those are notably foundational priorities to still be sorting out.
Their company website lists offices in five countries with 230 staff across 21 countries. Trinidad and Tobago appears on that site as a single statistic: 188,000 monthly active users, household consumption of US$17.58 billion. Not a team. Not a contact. Not a person. A number.
The .tt Domain Was Not an Accident
Part of why this deception worked so well is the domain itself.
A .tt domain does not just indicate a Trinidad-focused platform. In the minds of most users, it signals Trinidadian ownership. It is our country code. It says “this is from here.” Most local businesses, including banks, do not bother with it because of the cost. Republic Bank, one of the wealthiest financial institutions in the Caribbean, uses republicTT.com rather than republic.tt. The price point alone tells you something.
According to the Trinidad and Tobago Network Information Centre (TTNIC), the official government registry, a foreign registrant registering a second-level .tt domain like pin.tt pays US$600 for the initial three-year registration, and US$600 every three years to maintain it. That is approximately US$200 per year, or roughly TT$1,350 annually.
A standard .com domain costs any business approximately US$10 to 15 per year, TT$81 at most.
Larixon paid more than 1,500% above the cost of a standard domain. Not because they needed to, but because they needed to look local. That premium was a deliberate investment in appearing to be something they are not.
What the Archives Reveal
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves a snapshot of Larixon’s company website from January 2019, shortly after Pin.tt launched in Trinidad. What it shows is very different from what their website looks like today.
You can verify the archived page here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190131022402/http://www.larixon.com/
Under “Our Team,” the 2019 page lists a man named Graham Rostant with the title: Head of Pin.tt, Trinidad & Tobago. He appears alongside the heads of Mongolia, Tajikistan, and Cyprus. Every market, every face accounted for.
That same page carries a group photo with a caption that Larixon apparently did not think would matter once removed: “Development team, Russia.” Not Cyprus. Russia. The team actually building and maintaining the platform that hundreds of thousands of Trinidadians use daily was, by their own archived admission, based in Russia.
The 2019 page also shows four co-founders, not three. An Ilia Dzhmukhadze appears as co-founder alongside the current three. He is no longer listed on the company’s current website. No explanation given.
Graham Rostant no longer appears on Larixon’s current website either. No replacement has been listed for Trinidad. Jamaica has a named local head. Mongolia has a named local head. Tajikistan has a named local head. Trinidad does not.
A local face was needed to launch. One was found. The platform got its foothold. And then, quietly, Trinidad was reduced to a line item.
Your Data. Their Rules. No Accountability.
Pin.tt requires your phone number to use the platform. That is not standard practice for classifieds platforms. Facebook Marketplace does not require it. Most international equivalents do not require it. It is a deliberate design decision, and Larixon has never publicly explained it.
The Apple App Store listing for Pin.tt, submitted by Larixon Classifieds themselves, confirms the app shares certain data types with third parties, including location and personal information. Apple notes this disclosure has not been independently verified.
Where does that data go? How long is it kept? Who else can access it? None of these questions has been publicly answered by Larixon. And the harder truth is that Trinidad and Tobago have no binding legal mechanism to make them answer.
There is no bilateral data protection agreement between T&T and Cyprus. There is no local legal entity in Trinidad to serve a claim against. If your data is misused, sold, leaked, or handed to a third party you never consented to, the path to accountability is effectively nonexistent.
This is the same concern that has driven years of regulatory action against Facebook and Google in the European Union and the United States. The difference is that those governments had the institutional reach and political will to act. Ours does not, not against a Cyprus-registered holding company with Russian founders and Belarusian investors.
The Money Leaves. It Always Does.
Larixon reported US$10.4 million in total revenue across all five markets in 2025, with a 22.7% profit margin recorded in 2023. Every dollar a Trinidadian spends on promoted listings or paid features on Pin.tt flows out of this country.
It does not pay a Trinidadian salary. It does not fund a local office. It does not contribute meaningfully to corporate tax revenue here. It does not invest in local digital infrastructure or develop local technology talent.
Meanwhile, local classified platforms have come and gone. Not because the idea was wrong, but because they could not compete with a well-capitalised foreign operator who entered the market at scale with a local-looking domain, a polished app, a sustained advertising budget, and a local representative to give it credibility in the early days. The playing field was never level. It was never meant to be.
This Is Not an Isolated Case
Pin.tt is not an anomaly. It is a template.
I am already seeing other foreign-operated platforms positioning themselves in our local market with the same approach: local-sounding names, Trinidad-focused branding, no visible disclosure of who actually owns them or where they are registered. The same playbook, a new face.
Our market is small. Our regulatory infrastructure around digital platforms is limited. Our media landscape did not ask these questions the first time. That combination makes Trinidad and Tobago a straightforward target for this kind of quiet market capture.
Every time a foreign platform dominates a local category, it becomes harder for a Trinidadian entrepreneur to build something in that space. Not because the local idea is worse, but because they are competing against operators with more capital, more infrastructure, and no obligation to reinvest anything into this country.
What Digital Awareness Actually Looks Like
We know Google is American. We know Facebook is American. We know Amazon is American. We use them knowing exactly what they are and what the trade-offs look like. That transparency matters because it lets us make informed decisions.
There was no good reason for Pin.tt to present itself as something local. The .tt domain, the Caribbean-inflected marketing, the local management in the early days, all of it was engineered to close the distance between a foreign company and a local audience. It worked. And because no one said anything for years, it became so embedded that artificial intelligence now repeats the fiction as fact.
Digital awareness is not about being anti-foreign or refusing to use global platforms. It is about knowing who you are actually dealing with. It is about asking simple questions before you hand over your phone number, your location, and your money: Who owns this? Where are they based? Where does my data go? Who is accountable if something goes wrong?
Those are not complicated questions. But they are questions our market has not been asking. And the people who benefit most from that silence are not us.
You were never supporting local. You were supporting Larixon Classifieds, a Cyprus-registered, Russian-founded company whose own archived website identified its development team as being based in Russia.
Now you know. Start asking the questions.