Student launches business to improve supply chain

Fatih Ahmet Gurbuz has a goal to optimize supply chains by utilizing technology and putting the customer experience first. 

“This summer I was working at Amazon,” the fourth-year computer science student said. “One of the leadership principles they insisted on was customer obsession. Customer, customer, customer. The customer was always the star, not the competitors.”

It was the crisis COVID-19 caused for supply chains that opened Gurbuz's eyes and made him realize that supply chains were not optimized. And that lesson—customer, customer, customer—came flooding to the surface. That’s when QuickLink was born.

“Business to business trading companies are usually more monologic,” he said. “And I saw an opportunity to deliver higher quality service in that space.”

QuickLink—named after a piece of chain that connects other pieces of chains—“aims to connect chains together in a quick, reliable and easy way” by streamlining the full trading process in one place, including tracking. 

“Let's say you buy a product and then some weather gets bad or some other unplanned event happens and the supply chain is disrupted,” he explained. “We are going to integrate our platform with other existing data tools and sources to provide more accurate and up to date information.”

In the coming weeks, Gurbuz will launch his website and soon after, start trading a low risk product to learn more about the supply chain and international trade. 

To launch this project, Gurbuz received funding from the Student Entrepreneurship Fund and additional support from the Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship and think[box]. 

“Think[box] enriched my mind and made me feel comfortable,” he shared. “I thought ‘okay, this is a place where I can thrive and learn more.”