Building the storefront the chemical industry forgot to build
Walk into any modern consumer's life and commerce is frictionless. A tap buys almost anything. Yet the chemical industry, which supplies the raw materials behind that phone, that packaging, that coating, still runs much of its business on phone calls, faxed purchase orders, and spreadsheets passed between sales reps and buyers. Jay Bhatia has spent the better part of a decade trying to close that gap.
As founder and CEO of Agilis Commerce, based in Newark, New Jersey, Bhatia leads a software company built for one industry and one problem: giving chemical producers and distributors their own branded, cloud-based online portals so they can sell, market, and engage customers digitally. Agilis is not a marketplace that sits between buyer and seller. It is closer to a toolkit that lets a chemical company stand up its own storefront, keep its own brand, and own its own customer relationships.
That distinction matters to Bhatia. In an industry where relationships and trust are the currency of every deal, he has consistently framed his company as a collaborator rather than a disruptor. Agilis does not want to replace distributors. It wants to hand them better instruments.
An insider's frustration, turned into a product
Bhatia did not arrive at chemical commerce as an outsider looking for a market. He lived the problem. A chemical engineer by training, with an MBA in marketing and an executive MBA from Cornell, he spent more than 20 years inside global chemical companies before he ever wrote a business plan for a startup.
His career began at Shell, where from the late 1990s he served as a sales manager covering the Middle East and Indian subcontinent, a territory spanning some 15 countries, running the Resins and Versatics businesses. He later worked at Shell Chemicals, in its Hexion Specialty Chemicals arm, as a pricing and commercial manager, developing product-line strategies across commodity and specialty chemicals.
Then came BASF, where between 2005 and 2016 he moved through a series of marketing and business-management roles, from product manager to industry manager to head of marketing. Along the way he led an internal startup inside BASF's Intermediates division, taking it from concept to commercial stage. It was, in effect, a rehearsal for what came next.
By 2016 he had seen enough of how chemicals were bought and sold to believe the process was overdue for change. He founded Agilis to attack the inefficiency and complexity he and his colleagues had wrestled with for years. The question he kept returning to was simple: if nearly every other industry could reinvent itself with modern technology, why not this one?
Why one-size-fits-all does not fit chemicals
One of Bhatia's core convictions is that the chemical industry cannot simply bolt on a generic e-commerce engine. Buyers, distributors, and producers each operate under different constraints, different regulatory demands, and different ways of pricing and moving product. A commodity chemical sold by the tanker load behaves nothing like a specialty additive sold by the drum with a stack of regulatory documents attached.
That belief shaped the way Agilis built its platform: flexible enough to support customer portals, digital product catalogs, regulatory document management, and role-based access, rather than forcing every customer into the same template. Bhatia has been open about the practical realities of selling software into a cautious industry. He talks about the anxieties every buyer voices before signing on, the worry over whether customers and internal teams will actually adopt a new channel.
His answer has been a lean, iterative approach. Launch a minimum viable product, learn from real usage, and improve. Since the Agilis platform launched, it has been repeatedly upgraded on the back of customer feedback rather than shipped as a finished monument.
From e-commerce portals to AI
Agilis has not stood still, and neither has Bhatia's definition of what the company does. He is quick to point out that the term "digital commerce" now covers far more than it did just a couple of years ago. What started as branded e-commerce portals has expanded into product data enrichment, digital asset management, AI-powered search, and virtual assistants tailored to chemical buyers.
In 2024 the company launched Alchemist, a set of AI solutions aimed at customer engagement in the chemical industry, with specialty chemicals maker Evonik as an early pilot customer. It is a notable step for a sector often described as one of the last to embrace digital tools. Bhatia's pitch is that AI can help buyers navigate dense, technical product catalogs and get answers faster, without stripping away the human relationships the industry still depends on.
The results Bhatia points to are concrete rather than grandiose. Agilis has reported that its customers saw an average traffic increase of 36.4% in 2023 after digitizing their product data into structured digital catalogs. The company has also built portals for major producers, including an e-commerce portal for BASF's OPPANOL product family, a signal that the incumbents Bhatia once worked for are willing to build on the tools his company makes.
The long game
Agilis is not a company built for a quick exit. It has raised a relatively modest amount of venture funding, around $3.65 million, and has spent years grinding on a problem that requires patience and deep industry trust. That trajectory fits Bhatia's temperament. He is pragmatic about the pace of change in chemicals and clear-eyed about the fact that adoption, not technology, is usually the harder problem.
His stated mission is broad and durable: to simplify and automate transactions along every step of the chemical value chain, for buyers, distributors, and producers alike. It is the kind of goal that does not get finished in a single product launch. It gets pursued release by release, customer by customer.
What makes Bhatia's position unusual is the vantage point he brings. He is not a technologist who discovered chemicals, nor a chemical executive who dabbles in software. He is someone who sold the product, priced the product, and marketed the product across continents, then decided the machinery around all of that was broken and set out to rebuild it. Whether the chemical industry fully catches up to the rest of the digital economy is still an open question. But it has fewer excuses now than it did when Bhatia started.