Most people in Vancouver’s tech community have never heard of Alibris. That’s understandable. The company doesn’t have a flashy local office, doesn’t typically chase press, and doesn’t make noise about its partnerships. If you tried to find it in the city, you’d discover that the “Vancouver office” is essentially just a few people: CEO Anindo Dey, who relocated here four years ago, and some data analysts. That’s it. No team lunches, no big hiring plans, no ecosystem fanfare.

And yet, from this quiet, almost invisible base in Vancouver, Dey oversees one of the most important — and least understood — infrastructure companies in global ecommerce. Alibris, with only 20 employees worldwide, powers millions of book listings for Walmart, eBay, and now fast-fashion giant SHEIN, helping these platforms compete in one of Amazon’s most entrenched product categories.

What makes Alibris unusual is that it isn’t simply an online bookstore. The storefront most people see is just a thin layer on top of a far more consequential machine. The real company is a white-label marketplace platform that gives major retailers instant access to something extremely hard to build: millions of new, used, rare, independent, and collectible books supplied by more than 4,000 sellers. Alibris combines that supply with routing, fulfillment, metadata, API integrations, and all the operational plumbing required to make everything run smoothly when a customer clicks “Buy.”

“We’re a small company, but we have a platform,” Dey says. “We have the sellers, we provide the supply. Nobody else does this in the industry.” That mix — supply plus infrastructure — is what allows a company with barely two dozen people to offer Walmart five million book titles and supply eBay with nearly as many. It is also what allows a fast-fashion company to suddenly (and somewhat surprisingly) become a bookseller.

SHEIN’s decision to partner with Alibris marks a new phase in its marketplace ambitions. The two companies had been in discussions for more than a year, and spent about five months on technical integration alone. “It’s a heavy-weight integration of APIs onto the SHEIN platform,” Dey explains. The testing took even longer — because, as he points out, you cannot accelerate the shipping of a physical book through the mail, even in a test environment. “If I order a book today, I’ll receive the book after one week. There’s no way to speed that up. UPS or USPS will only go so fast.”

The partnership launched this November with 100,000 titles — a tiny fraction of what Alibris hopes to bring to the platform. “One hundred thousand is literally two or three percent of what we eventually want to achieve,” Dey notes. “My target for the team is to launch with three million. Hopefully we get there in six months.” For SHEIN, which has ambitions to diversify far beyond clothing, adding a deep and varied book inventory is a strategic step. For Alibris, it’s another major marketplace proving that the company can deliver at Amazon-like scale without being Amazon.

This is also why platforms like Walmart could’ve been skeptical at first. “In their own words, they were like, ‘Sure, but nobody has that supply outside of Amazon.’ And we said, ‘We do.’ And we proved it,” Dey boasts. Today, Walmart’s listing of over five million unique book titles flows through Alibris’ pipes.

The company’s position is attractive not only to big retailers but also to sellers who want to reduce their reliance on Amazon. “Amazon can make or break you as a business,” Dey says. “We charge less fees than Amazon. We give sellers the diversification they need.” That diversification — making it easier for independent sellers to reach customers across multiple platforms — has become one of Alibris’ quiet competitive advantages.

Even in the age of AI, Dey remains grounded in what his company actually needs to do to succeed. Instead of building expensive proprietary systems, Alibris focuses on clean metadata, structured product information, and making its catalog readable by large models and search engines. “AI for us is about search,” he explains. “We make sure everything is searchable and extractable so platforms like Google, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok — they can read our content and extract it as a search result.” It’s a refreshing, practical answer in a hype-driven moment: a small company doing what is necessary rather than what is fashionable.

Dey’s route to Vancouver, and to the CEO role, spans continents and industries. He trained in 3D design and economics, worked across editing, sales, partnerships, and eventually became CTO for Pearson in India and South Asia. He managed publishing programs for IBM, Cisco, and Dell before moving into mobile apps and IT services, and eventually was recruited to run Alibris by an investor who knew his background and trusted his judgment. “It was a gentleman’s agreement,” he says. “He felt I could do the job. I was ready for the responsibility.” 

He’s now been CEO for eight and a half years.

He moved to Canada during the pandemic, not because of a business opportunity but because the U.S. visa system temporarily froze. Vancouver offered stability, quality of life, and a workable time zone — even if most of his customers and partners remain in the U.S. While he hasn’t yet built deep ties into the local tech community, he’s been quietly leading a company that plays an outsized role in global ecommerce.

And that’s the real story here: a low-profile CEO, working from an overlooked corner of Vancouver, running a 20-person operation that powers book sales for Walmart, eBay and now SHEIN, one of the most consequential marketplace expansions of the year. His team is small, his presence understated, but the impact of his work is felt across some of the largest platforms in retail.

In a city full of startups chasing visibility, Alibris is a reminder that some of the most globally relevant companies in Vancouver are the ones you’d never think to look for.