When Henry Choo started thinking about building a startup, he didn’t have to look far for a problem to solve. The chaos was right there in his spreadsheets.
“I used to manage the snacks portfolio at Nestlé,” he says. “Uncle Tobys, and brands like it.. The biggest lever we had to hit our sales numbers? Supermarket trade promotions.”
Think: the little yellow half-price stickers on your favourite cereal. They seem simple. But behind the scenes? “A mess,” Henry says. “Thousands of manual data entries. Huge spends. And a mountain of data to analyse to figure out what’s working and what’s not..”
Globally, brands spend over a trillion dollars each year on supermarket trade promotions yet over 50% of them fail to break even.
“That’s hundreds of billions of dollars, just leaking out,” Henry says. “It’s wild.”
PromoSync is built to tackle that inefficiency.
It’s an AI-powered platform designed to help consumer goods companies from Nestlé to P&G to run trade promotions better. Think less manual data entry, more smart insights. Less lag time, more real-time optimisation.
Before launching PromoSync, Henry worked in both big CPG companies and U.S. tech startups. That fusion of deep industry pain and startup thinking was the spark to stop waiting for someone to create a solution but instead build one. “It’s a problem I’ve lived. I know how frustrating it is to pour hours into spreadsheets that don’t even tell you what worked. I thought: surely, there’s a better way.”
That insight turned into a mission during the Student Fellowship, and was sharpened again in Launch Club, Startmate’s pre-accelerator for early-stage founders. It was here where Henry found not just a startup path but a shift in mindset and how just showing up can give you a great outcome in the early days of building.
“I used to feel like an imposter,” he admits. “Like, who am I to build a company? But something changed. I realised: this is what makes me come alive.”
At Launch Club, Henry found a community of equally ambitious founders, many of whom were tackling legacy industries full of inefficiencies just like consumer goods. “Everyone was obsessed with their customer,” he says. “That really stuck with me. I started calling people I hadn’t spoken to in years just to dig deeper into the problem.”
That obsession led to early pilots with customers and a clear path toward product-market fit. “There’s so much going on behind the scenes in this space,” he says. “I want to tell those stories and build the solution to fix them.”
What's next?
With early pilots underway, PromoSync’s next chapter is all about scale and staying relentlessly customer-focused.
“I’m excited,” Henry says. “I started this thinking I was building a tool. But I’ve realised it’s so much more. It’s a chance to transform how an entire industry works and I’m all in.”
📩 Learn more about Promosync and connect with Henry.
