chemical-industry
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Jim Knaub Is Marketing the Chemistry Nobody Sees
After more than two decades inside chemicals and materials, the engineer-turned-executive has taken on a deceptively hard brief: make advanced silicones legible, useful and commercially sharp.
Agilis
Agilis (Agilis Chemicals Inc., dba Agilis Commerce) is a Newark, New Jersey SaaS company that helps chemical, plastics and ingredients producers and distributors digitize their commercial product data and launch branded digital commerce portals in weeks rather than years. Founded in 2016 by former BASF and Shell executive Jay Bhatia, its platform - spanning product information management, digital catalogs, customer self-service hubs and the Alchemist AI suite - gives suppliers an AI-ready data foundation and a modern buyer experience. Customers include BASF, Evonik, Westlake and Wanhua, and in 2025 Agilis partnered with supply-chain network Elemica to build the chemical industry's first end-to-end digital commerce and execution platform.
Jay Bhatia
Jay Bhatia is the founder and CEO of Agilis Commerce (Agilis Chemicals), a Newark, New Jersey software company that builds cloud-based, branded e-commerce and AI-enabled customer engagement platforms purpose-built for the chemical industry. A chemical engineer and MBA with more than two decades at global players like BASF and Shell Chemicals, he launched Agilis in 2016-2017 to bring the digital tools of modern commerce to an industry long defined by manual, relationship-heavy processes. Under his leadership, Agilis has raised roughly $3.65M and rolled out its Alchemist AI solutions with pilot customers including Evonik.
Ali Amin-Javaheri
Ali Amin-Javaheri is the co-founder and CEO of Knowde, the B2B digital marketplace and data platform transforming how the $5 trillion global chemicals industry does business online. With 11 years of experience at ChemPoint - where he helped scale the chemical distribution startup to over $400M in revenue - Ali built Knowde from a PowerPoint vision into a platform hosting 8,000+ supplier storefronts and 230,000+ chemical products. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, and Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher's fund), Knowde has raised $180.8M total, including a $60M Series C in August 2024. Ali's drive is deeply personal: his father Mehdi fled Iran in 1985 and struggled to find work commensurate with his chemical engineering degree, and Ali grew up reading chemistry trade magazines, determined to modernize an industry built on relationships and paper catalogs.