Chaldal

About Chaldal

Chaldal is an online grocery delivery company that has grown into the largest platform of its kind in Bangladesh, delivering a wide catalog of household and grocery products directly to customers across Dhaka and beyond. Waseem Alim co-founded the company in September 2013 alongside Zia Ashraf and Tejas Viswanath, after spending years working inside some of Silicon Valley's most established technology and finance companies.

At the time of founding, online grocery delivery barely existed as a category in Bangladesh, and building the logistics to support it meant starting from close to nothing, with no established playbook for how to run same-day grocery delivery in a market with unpredictable addresses and largely cash-based payments.

From Wharton to Silicon Valley

Waseem Alim graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Finance and Entrepreneurship, and later earned the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. He went on to work at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and the American Enterprise Institute before joining Wikinvest.

His most direct preparation for building Chaldal came at SigFig, a Silicon Valley financial technology startup, where he served as Director of Product Strategy. There, he led development of a web-based portfolio management product that grew to more than 500,000 users, experience that shaped how he would later think about product design at Chaldal.

Coming Home to Build a Grocery Platform

Rather than adapting an existing global grocery-delivery model wholesale, Waseem Alim and his co-founders built Chaldal's fulfillment and delivery systems around the realities of Dhaka's roads, addresses, and consumer habits. That ground-up approach, rather than importing a template built for a different market, shaped nearly every operational decision in the company's early years, from how delivery zones were mapped to how orders were routed to the nearest available warehouse.

Building Bangladesh's Largest Online Grocer

Under Waseem Alim's leadership, Chaldal has grown into the largest online grocery business in Bangladesh, delivering a wide catalog of household and grocery products directly to customers across Dhaka and beyond. That scale took years of building out warehousing, delivery fleets, and inventory systems most Bangladeshi e-commerce companies hadn't needed to solve before, now supported by a workforce numbering in the thousands.

Mahbub M M Muntasin serves as Chief Operating Officer and Rezaur Rahman Jitu as Chief Technology Officer, rounding out the leadership team responsible for Chaldal's day-to-day logistics and technology operations.

A Product-First Approach

Waseem Alim has continued to draw on his product management background from SigFig in how he runs Chaldal, treating the platform's technology and user experience as central to its competitive position rather than a secondary concern behind logistics. That product discipline has helped Chaldal maintain its lead as more competitors have entered Bangladesh's online grocery space in the years since its founding.

An Active Voice in the Startup Ecosystem

Waseem Alim remains an active voice in Bangladesh's startup ecosystem, writing and speaking about capital allocation, e-commerce infrastructure, and the practical challenges of scaling a logistics-heavy business in an emerging market. That public presence has made him a reference point for other founders building physical-logistics-dependent businesses in Bangladesh, not just a grocery delivery operator.

Where Chaldal Stands Today

More than a decade after its founding, Chaldal employs several thousand people across its warehousing, delivery, and technology operations, making it one of the largest employers among the e-commerce companies profiled in this directory. Employee reviews point to a large, operationally intensive workplace, consistent with a company running physical logistics at national scale rather than a purely software-based business, a distinction that shapes both its hiring needs and the day-to-day experience of working there compared to a smaller software product company.

Products

Chaldal's platform centers on grocery and household product delivery rather than a single packaged software product.

Online Grocery Delivery is Chaldal's core service, offering a wide catalog of groceries and household goods delivered directly to customers across Dhaka and beyond.

Warehousing and Fulfillment infrastructure supports the delivery platform, built specifically around Dhaka's roads, addresses, and delivery constraints rather than adapted from a foreign logistics model.

Chaldal Mobile App provides the primary customer ordering interface, reflecting Waseem Alim's product-first approach to running the business.

Across grocery delivery, warehousing, and its mobile ordering platform, Chaldal's business reflects the same product-and-logistics combination that built the company since 2013, run by a team numbering in the thousands across Dhaka.