Waseem Alim

About Waseem Alim

Waseem Alim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Chaldal, an online grocery delivery company that has grown into the largest platform of its kind in Bangladesh. Before returning to Dhaka to build it, he spent years working inside some of Silicon Valley's most established technology and finance companies.

From Wharton to Silicon Valley

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.

Coming Home to Build a Grocery Platform

In 2013, Alim moved back to Dhaka and co-founded Chaldal alongside Zia Ashraf and Tejas Viswanath. At the time, online grocery delivery barely existed as a category in Bangladesh, and building the logistics to support it meant starting from close to nothing.

Rather than adapting an existing global grocery-delivery model wholesale, the founding team built Chaldal's fulfillment and delivery systems around the realities of Dhaka's roads, addresses, and consumer habits.

Building Bangladesh's Largest Online Grocer

Under 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.

A Product-First Approach

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.

He 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.