By: Alanna Fairey

Talking with Harry Chemko feels like sitting across from someone who has already spent years turning a problem over in his head, long before he says a word about it. He is warm, unhurried, and easy to draw into a story about his kids or a Blue Jays game before the conversation ever turns to business. Based in Vancouver with a schedule that keeps him in Toronto often, Harry Chemko is the co-founder and CEO of ShopVision, the market and competitive intelligence platform built to give brands and retailers the same visibility into their category that they already have into their own four walls.

Harry’s path to ShopVision runs through Elastic Path, the ecommerce software company he started at university with a $15,000 loan from what is now Futurpreneur Canada. Entrepreneurship had pulled at him well before that first company existed, and once he got going, he stayed close to the instinct to build lean. He and his team ran Elastic Path on that same loan alone for the first ten years, choosing to bootstrap rather than raise outside capital. That company grew over two decades to run online experiences for major brands and telcos, including T-Mobile and Charlotte Tilbury.

It later ran the online store for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, an assignment that had Harry’s team managing 7,000 SKUs, a 100-person call center, and a 40,000-square-foot warehouse as the official retail partner of the Games. Partway through Elastic Path’s growth, Harry joined Futurpreneur Canada’s board, a role he held for fourteen years.

The concept for ShopVision originated from observing various brands at Elastic Path relying on instinct rather than data. Teams appeared polished on the surface, yet they often made decisions regarding pricing, promotions, and merchandising based on gut feelings, without a clear understanding of how their category was evolving. Harry and his co-founders Peter Sheldon and Jeff Neil each reached the same conclusion from different perspectives. A poor sales day could stem from an issue specific to the brand or indicate a broader market shift, and almost no one had the data to distinguish between the two. This gap led to the creation of ShopVision.

A Company Designed to Automate First

Harry describes ShopVision as an experiment in building a company differently from the start. Rather than growing an organization and layering tools on top of it afterward, he pushed his team to question every meeting, every manual process, and every recurring task, and to automate what could be automated before building a habit around it. This approach, he has found, increases the need for skilled people in the right roles even as it raises what each person can accomplish. He points to metrics like revenue per employee as the new measure investors care about most.

The tradeoff, in his experience, is speed. A single release from a major AI lab can reshape a roadmap in a day. Staying ahead now means monitoring that pace constantly rather than planning in long, settled cycles.

Three Founders, One Working Relationship

ShopVision’s leadership team is made up of three co-founders, each bringing distinct experiences from their careers. Harry had known Peter since Peter worked at Elastic Path early in his career. Jeff came on board after years of leading engineering teams on the brand side, ready to focus his experience on building AI solutions.

Peter brings deep product and commerce expertise, while Jeff leads the technical side of ShopVision, drawing on years of experience building engineering teams for major brands. Together, their strengths allow Harry to focus on company strategy, category creation, and growth. For Harry, the partnership works because each founder has a clearly defined area of ownership and enough trust to let the others lead within it. He believes this connection is key to maintaining company culture during rapid growth.

Values That Anchor the Work

ShopVision’s mission centers on delivering what the company calls the deepest dataset in commerce, tracking more than 300,000 brands, retailers, and marketplaces and 15 million products daily. That data becomes real-time intelligence embedded in the workflows that shape a brand’s most critical decisions. The company’s stated values, described internally as seeing first, betting bold, and outrunning yesterday, show up directly in how Harry talks about the business. There is a refusal to sit on the fence, a habit of digging past the first easy answer, and a determination to make each release and each customer conversation sharper than the last.

What Comes Next

Looking ahead, Harry’s focus stays on keeping ShopVision at the leading edge of how AI reshapes the way brands and retailers operate, so that better decisions on the business side translate into better experiences for the consumers those brands serve. He sees this as a continuation of the same instinct that led him to start ShopVision in the first place. Watching AI mature to the point where it could finally give teams the market context they had always been missing shaped the platform he built to put that context directly into their daily workflows.

Harry has spent more than twenty years building companies around the idea that better information beats better guessing, and ShopVision is his clearest attempt yet at proving it. He is easy to underestimate in a room full of louder personalities, right up until the conversation turns to data, category creation, or the next problem worth automating away.

Learn more about ShopVision’s work at www.shopvision.ai.