The Chabis.Com Story!

Success with stress is acceptable. Success makes life easier anyway. Success though is not a measurement necessary of intelligence. There are many more hard-working engineers out there who are probably more talented than these two, but perhaps haven't had their ideas and technical savvy.

Have you ever thought of buying something online and then decided against it only because there were too many details to give and too many forms to fill out? Well that's exactly the problem that Chabi.com can solve for internet users. The duo has come up with a product that lets you store all your different Logins, passwords and registration information at the Chabi.com site. You can even ship gifts to friends and family at the click of a button. This not only makes internet shopping easier but also is a great way to do online banking and keep in touch with anyone from any corner of the world.

Jai Rawat the President & CEO of the Chabi.com teamed up with his college buddy, Samir Palnitkar, who is the Chief Operating Officer of the company and started Chabi.com. Chabi.com was founded in 1998 and incorporated in 1999 by the duo who decided that their idea was so good that they quit their jobs in February. Chabi.com got it's initial support from Ashish Gupta, the founder of Junglee, that was later acquired by Amazon.com for $200 million. The Company's first funding came from Sequoia Capital, one of the top venture capital firms. The company has set high standards for itself and aims to be first truly personal e-commerce management system.

Jai and Samir know each other from their IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) days. They graduated one year apart and have been friends for 12 years. They lived pretty close to each other and constantly talked about the exciting things happening on the internet front. Samir founded a semi-conductor company before this in the silicon valley and says that it was that experience that helped him with this company. The pair focused on the problems that internet users face on E-Commerce sites. Samir goes on to explain that E-Commerce bridges the gap between consumers and businesses but does not do away with all the formalities of filling out name,shipping address and other registration information. So they came up with Chabi.com that does all that extra work for you while you shop and surf the net. So next time you forget your password, remember to register with Chabi.com and all your worries end there.

The security system on the site is also good. The personal information, that you give at the site, is encrypted. The company aims to satisfy the businesses as well as the end users. Though Chabi.com cannot claim to be the first of it's kind, but it's certainly different. There are people who are working on disparate parts of the solution but there is nobody who's really providing the comprehensive set of services hat they are providing. They are totally bridging the gap between the users and the sites. Registration which is known as the checking process to checking out process once you have actually registered and they help in actual buying too. They charge no fee for registration.

Basically credit card insurance is one of the biggest insurances that they depend on.

There are many ways of earning revenue. Sites make money by getting the users and keeping them. Getting the users is the biggest hurdle. We are trying to make that process very simple so for each registration that we deliver to a site, we can charge a small fee. Sites are spending from $10 to $500 to acquire one user. So if we deliver one user and ask them for $10, I don't think they'll mind. Well this is one of the ways of making money. We'll be making life easier for the user and I don't see why people shouldn't like this idea. Being able to provide an end to end solution, allows us that leverage. We can make money by letting advertising on our site too. Said Samir Palnitkar.

The pilot site was already launched with about a 1000 initial users and they plan to launch the product in september.

The Founders

Jai Rawat, founder, CEO and CTO, has formerly held key positions in successful Silicon Valley companies such as TIBCO and LSI. Jai holds a B. Tech in Computer science from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and a M.S in computer Science from Iowa State University. Samir Palnitkar, founder and CEO, has played key roles at companies such as SUN Microsystems and Hitachi. He was also a founder of Integrated Intellectual Property, Inc. a semiconductor design company. Samir holds a B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and an M.S.E.E. from University of Washington, Seattle and an M.B.A. from San Jose State University.

Some of the other team members are Oswald D'sa, Director of operations, Ravi Durairaj, Director of Database Engineering and Komal Shah, Director of Product Management.

Facts

When Jai Rawat and Samir Palnitkar first did research to start Chabi.com they came across some astounding facts! By the year 2003, 56 million U.S households will be on the internet. Out of those, 35 million will be shopping online and there will be about 19 million online financial services. The problem faced by the internet users today is that there are about more than 100 million publicly addressable web sites and they provide all kinds of functions like shopping, banking, trading, brokerage, Email, Personal Management etc, but all these sites don't provide convenience. So the duo decided to expand on their idea and make an internet site that overcomes all these draw backs.People spending as much as $ 8 billion on online shopping in U.S alone the idea sounds appealing both returns-wise and convenience-wise.

The Solution

The solution that they came up with was what they decided to call Chabi, meaningfully. So what Chabi does is; Sits at the bottom of the browser window, it's omnipresent yet unintrusive, it provides single sign-on and fills all forms at supported sites.

The Vision

Chabi.com's Vision is to provide a more organized and managed approach to electronic commerce using Internet Technologies. It's services are focused on simplifying the user's e-commerce experience by automating the flow of information between the consumers and websites. This allows users to perform online banking, shopping, email, stock trading or other transactions more easily and efficiently with a single click of the mouse. Chabi.com provides it's customers with single click Internet account login, automatic online form filling, and a unique email forwarding with a universal email address.

The Technology

The technology is a lightweight, highly scalable form-filling technology that is accessible from any computer on the internet. Chabi.com currently has 3 patents pending on this technology and 2 patents in the pipeline.

The Funding