Ali Amin-Javaheri has a clear vision for transforming the world’s largest and most ubiquitous industry. He sees the world of technology rapidly converging with marketing and sales in the chemical industry to bring its buyers and sellers together in new ways. He is a chemical business veteran with a firm grasp on what it takes to build a tech startup in Silicon Valley. As co-founder and CEO of Knowde — THE online marketplace for ingredients, polymers and chemistry — he is leading the team that is changing the way chemical commerce is conducted.
Under Amin-Javaheri’s leadership, Knowde has become a powerful platform that connects thousands of suppliers — more than any distributor, marketplace or middleman organization in the history of the industry — with tens of thousands of R&D and procurement professionals. Buyers use Knowde to simplify the process of searching, finding and acquiring the materials they need to cut development time and get products to market faster. Chemical companies get leading-edge technology that extends their market reach, lowers their cost of sales, and gives their customers the online buying experience they want.
Amin-Javaheri has been successful in raising three rounds of investment totaling more than $92 million from Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms. The only VC-backed marketplace in the industry, Knowde’s investors include Coatue, Sequoia Capital, Refactor Capital, Bee Partners, Cantos Ventures, Sound Ventures (founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary), TQ Ventures (founded by Schuster Tanger, Andrew Marks, and Scooter Braun), K5 Global, and Mantis VC in partnership with The Chainsmokers.
Amin-Javaheri and the founding team launched Knowde in 2017. Prior to that, he spent more than a decade with ChemPoint, in various technology and executive marketing and sales functions. He is a graduate of the University of Washington with a BA in Information Systems, and holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.