Aiming to reduce procurements costs for small businesses in Bangladesh

Over the course of months of hard work through the eLab program, Debasish Chakraborty, M.P.A. ’23 refined his business idea from providing warehouse services to Bangladeshi farmers to developing a procurement platform for small businesses. And thus, Chamak was born.

“After a rigorous customer discovery process, we discovered the gap of sourcing inefficiencies of small businesses in my country due to the excessive number of intermediaries,” Chakraborty said. “Then, based on customer feedback, we focused on developing a procurement platform that could make both distribution and procurement efficient at the same time.”

Chakraborty and other members of Chamak will present their business during Demo Day April 13 at the Entrepreneurship at Cornell Celebration.

“We want to be the No. 1 procurement platform in Bangladesh,” he said.

Chamak is intended to help small businesses procure their inventories directly from manufacturers.

“By using our platform, small businesses and manufacturers can avoid three to five layers of intermediaries and save up to 30% of costs,” he said. “Our mission is to limit the number of intermediaries in the distribution chain of Bangladesh so that farmers and manufacturers of products can get fair prices from their businesses.”

Chakraborty noted that Bangladesh has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Chamak has already generated $75,000 in revenue as of February 2023.

“As an entrepreneur in a developing country, I severely lacked the basics of building startups,” he said — fortunately, however, a variety of Cornell resources and experiences have aided Chakraborty on his journey.

Entrepreneurial management courses and the eLab program provided knowledge for building a strong foundation of product development that customers want and gave Chakraborty the confidence to increase the scale of the business. A subscription to PitchBook, a vast database of information on companies, investors, funds and transactions, provided insight in identifying the right pool of investors. And, mentoring by eLab advisory board members provided guidance on understanding the business from a different angle.

After going through the process, Chakraborty has specific goals in mind for the future of the company.

“We want to be the No. 1 procurement platform in Bangladesh,” he said. “We want to reach the milestone of 5 million customers and $100 billion in platform transactions by 2030.”

eLab Demo Day takes place April 13 from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the Statler Auditorium.

Written by Jesse Osbourne
Strategic Communications at Cornell University