Every time you see a discount tag on a supermarket shelf, you’re looking at the outcome of a trade promotion. What you don’t see is the mountain of manual work behind it, thousands of lines of data copied from spreadsheets, pasted into retailer systems, and prone to human error at every step.
Henry Choo and Divyanshu Chauhan are here to fix that. Their startup, Promosync, is bringing operational infrastructure to the heart of FMCG retail, and it might just change the way products move through the global supply chain.
The problem no one sees (but everyone pays for)
Henry spent years working in category management and brand roles at Nestlé and Procter & Gamble. That’s where he saw the same painful problem on repeat: trade promotions drive over 50% of sales and cost brands hundreds of millions, yet more than half of them fail to break even. Why? Because executing a promotion is pure chaos.
"For one household brand, just running promotions at one major retailer meant over 50,000 data entries," Henry says. "Mistakes lead to missed sales, stockouts, and invoice disputes."
Promosync automates this. It plugs into retailer portals, ingests supplier data, transforms it into the right format, and submits it, without errors, in seconds.
One customer demoed it live for their entire team. What used to take 10 hours? Now done in 30 seconds. No mistakes.
The founders: A partnership that works in sync
Henry first had the idea during the Startmate Student Founder Bootcamp. He later joined Launch Club, where he validated the insight but lacked the technical firepower to bring it to life.
Enter Divyanshu Chauhan. A seasoned tech founder with two previous startups under his belt, Div had spent time at CSIRO and worked with startups like Shippit and Indebted. They met at Stone & Chalk, while Div was building his other startup, Chefadora and quickly realised their strengths were perfectly complementary.
"I needed help with sales, and Henry just unlocked things I couldn’t," Div says. "Then I helped him shape the product technically. We did a two-month trial and wrote up a founder agreement. It felt like dating before marriage."
By the time Startmate Accelerator kicked off, they were all in.
From pilot to power users
Like any good startup, Promosync’s early traction came from hustle. Henry spent months chasing a dream client, trying every channel, LinkedIn, email, events, and even Instagram. When nothing worked, he handwrote a letter, packaged it with Turkish delight, and mailed it to their head office.
A week later, he got the call. That client is now a paying customer.
Since then, they’ve added multiple major FMCG brands to their customer list (kept confidential here).
"That validation changed everything," Henry says. "It showed us we weren’t just solving a niche problem; this is an industry-wide pain point.
What's next
Promosync currently works with major grocery retailers. Next up: new vertical channels like liquor, convenience and pharmacy.
Long-term, the vision is global. The same problem exists in the UK, the US, and beyond. And the use case doesn’t stop at promotions.
"Anytime a new product enters a retailer’s system, a manual workflow happens. Fashion, pharmacy, hardware, we can automate all of it," Div says.
They see Promosync becoming the operational backbone for agentic AI across retail. The layer that powers automation, not just analytics.
Lessons from the founders
Div’s top advice? "Sell before you build. Validate before you code. Don’t fall into the trap of building the wrong thing."
Henry’s mantra? "Do things that don’t scale. Writing a letter won us a deal. Most founders are afraid to get creative, but creativity cuts through."
Both founders emphasise the importance of team chemistry.
"You can’t do this alone," Henry says. "You need a co-founder who complements you, challenges you, and shares your values. That’s what makes it work."
The ask
Promosync is looking to connect with any founders or operators who:
- Sell physical products to retailers
- Work in food, drink, health, beauty, fashion, or home goods
If that’s you, or someone you know, connect with the founders on LinkedIn (Henry Choo and Divyanshu Chauhan). Because the best kind of infrastructure is invisible. And Promosync is quietly building the rails for the future of retail.
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