Profile
The PowerPoint That Didn't Change
Most founders pivot. Ali Amin-Javaheri didn't. He built the exact company he sketched in a PowerPoint in 2017. "If I were to show you the slide deck from when Knowde was nothing more than a PowerPoint four years ago," he said, "you'd be shocked by how similar Knowde is today." He had obsessed over this problem for so many years that when the time came to build, there was nothing left to figure out. Only to execute.
The problem: the global chemicals industry - a $5 trillion behemoth that touches everything from your shampoo to the paint on an airplane wing - ran almost entirely on PDF datasheets, phone calls, and trade show handshakes. Buyers couldn't find products online. Suppliers had no digital storefronts. Data was scattered, inconsistent, and locked in paper. In 2017, if a cosmetics brand wanted to source a new emulsifier, they called their rep, waited for an email, and hoped the spec sheet arrived before the deadline.
Ali had watched this from inside. He spent 11 years at ChemPoint, a chemical distribution startup, rising to Vice President of Marketing & Sales while the company scaled to over $400 million in annual revenue. He knew the inefficiencies from inside the machine - and he knew exactly what the digital version of the industry should look like.
"I had obsessed about this for so many years. I knew in my mind exactly what I wanted to build. It literally has not changed."
Ali Amin-Javaheri, Knowde CEOIn 2017, Ali enlisted Wojciech Krupa - a business school friend who had spent years building online marketplaces at LinkedIn - as technical co-founder, and Janakiraman Swamy as Chief Knowledge Officer. They named the company Knowde and started building a marketplace for chemicals and ingredients that would work the way buyers actually wanted: searchable, digital, and direct.
A Pandemic as Accelerant
Knowde launched into a slow-moving industry that was skeptical of change. Then COVID hit. Chemical salespeople couldn't get in their company cars. They couldn't visit customers. The entire model of relationship-driven distribution was temporarily suspended. Buyers needed to find and evaluate products from a screen - and for the first time, they had no alternative.
"Obviously, COVID has been disastrous," Ali said, "but I don't know that this company could have been built without it." He didn't celebrate the chaos - he simply recognized that sometimes conditions force the adoption that common sense alone cannot. Knowde was ready. The industry wasn't, but it had no choice.
Sequoia Capital came in around 2020. Coatue led a $72 million Series B in 2021. By 2023, Knowde had 2.9 million unique visitors - double the year before. In August 2024, Blue Cloud Ventures, Point72 Private Investments, and Socium Ventures anchored a $60 million Series C. Total funding: $180.8 million.
The Industry of His Father
There's a reason Ali didn't just pick chemicals for the market size. His father Mehdi discovered his passion for chemistry at 18, earned a chemical engineering degree from the University of Maryland in the 1960s, and returned to Iran to help build the first nylon plant in the Middle East - for DuPont, no less. In 1985, after political instability forced the family to leave, Mehdi immigrated to the United States with his wife Roya and their children.
In America, his credentials didn't translate. He couldn't find comparable engineering work and took blue-collar jobs to support the family. Ali grew up in that household - watching his father's respect for chemistry, for scientific innovation, for a career he'd been forced to leave behind. As a young boy, Ali read through his father's chemistry books and trade magazines. Not because he was told to. Because he wanted to understand the industry his father never had the chance to fully participate in.
Knowde, then, isn't just a business. It's a tribute to an industry that deserved better infrastructure - and to a father who deserved a better path.
"Digitization in the chemical industry is not just about transforming data; it's about transforming relationships."
Ali Amin-JavaheriBuilding the Infrastructure Layer
Today Knowde operates two interlocking things: a marketplace and a data platform. The marketplace connects buyers - R&D teams, procurement managers, formulators at Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and P&G - with over 8,000 supplier storefronts listing 230,000+ chemical products. Searching for an agrochemical stabilizer or a cosmetic emulsifier is now searchable, filterable, and instant.
The data platform is where the AI plays. Chemical product data is famously dirty - inconsistent naming conventions, different units, missing fields, contradictory specs across datasheets from the same supplier. Knowde built AI-powered data harmonization to clean, standardize, and enrich this data at scale. The pitch is that chemical companies can finally have a master data record they trust, instead of a patchwork of PDFs maintained by people who are about to retire.
At the Knowde Executive Summit in 2025, Ali delivered a keynote focused squarely on AI adoption urgency. The chemical industry is historically a late adopter. But the younger generation of R&D and procurement professionals expects to do business the way they shop for everything else - online, self-service, immediate. Ali reads that generational shift as a forcing function, not a hope.
On Change, People, and the Why
Anyone who has tried to digitize a relationship-driven industry has heard the same two words: "change management." Ali hears them constantly. His take is direct and unusually patient: people can change, but only when they understand why. "A lot of times folks want that if they understand the why and it's being repeated over and over again as to why it's so important."
He's not a bulldozer. He's a conviction-holder who waits for conditions to catch up to the vision - and has built a track record of being right about when they will. ChemPoint proved the model at the distributor level. Knowde is proving it at the industry level. The thesis hasn't changed. Only the scale has.
Ali splits his time between New York and the Knowde team in San Jose. He holds a BA in Information Systems from the University of Washington and an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He's also a member of AIChE - the American Institute of Chemical Engineers - which, for a business guy by training, says something about how deep the chemistry obsession actually runs.