The call came at an hour that told me it wasn’t a catch-up.

A friend of mine runs one of the largest venture funds in Southeast Asia. He has spent fifteen years walking into rooms in Boston and Riyadh and Zurich explaining, patiently, that this region was the next great story. He built a career on that sentence.

He didn’t sound like that anymore.

“Everything,” he said, “is getting marked to zero.”

It’s hyperbole. Funds don’t literally write portfolios down to nothing. But a man whose entire professional identity rests on this region’s promise reached for the most extreme sentence available to him, and it did not feel extreme to say out loud.

I have heard that tone once before. May 2019, watching Uber open at forty-five dollars and close at forty-one sixty, and understanding within about a week that the chain of capital I had built our roadmap on had frozen from the top down.

So I know what this is. What I didn’t understand then, and do now, is why a region this large can be repriced by so few events, and why the bill so rarely lands on the people who caused it.

The Man in the Food Court

The first time I met Nadiem Makarim, he came down to a food court.

Gojek’s headquarters occupied the top two floors of a Jakarta shopping mall. He didn’t book a conference room. We sat at a plastic table wedged between a fried chicken chain and a coffee kiosk, kids running past, the smell of nasi goreng in the air. I had thirty minutes.

He listened for eight, then started asking questions. Unit economics. Retention by cohort. Rider CAC, passenger CAC, the ratio between them and its direction. Not one question about vision. He had heard a thousand visions.

Years later I watched footage of that same man walking into a courthouse in a prosecutor’s vest. He was sentenced to ten years over the procurement of Chromebook laptops during his time as education minister, a case built partly on Google having been an early investor in Gojek’s parent company. Outside, hundreds of ojek drivers gathered to support the man who had given them an industry. (ABC News)

I have no interest in litigating his guilt. What interests me is the recalculation that followed.

Mature markets don’t do this. When one American founder is indicted, American venture capital does not pause. There are ten thousand other data points holding the thesis up. Our region has maybe a dozen, and two or three of them are faces. Indonesia had Nadiem. That is not a compliment to him. It is a diagnosis of us.

The Fraud Tax

The Gojek round took six months to close and nearly broke me. Question lists that ran for pages. Follow-ups on the answers, then follow-ups on those. We spent more on legal fees in six months than we had spent running the entire first year of the company. I remember sitting in the office at two in the morning convinced these people did not want to invest, they wanted to punish me.

I understand now that I was getting diligence at a discount.

In late 2024, an Indonesian aquaculture startup called eFishery was reported for financial manipulation. Across nine months it told investors it had done roughly $752 million in revenue against a real figure of about $157 million, and reported a $16 million profit while losing $35.4 million. The founder was sentenced to nine years, later reduced to six. SoftBank, Temasek, Peak XV and 42XFund were all in. (Career Candour)

Malaysia’s state pension fund put close to $48 million into that round after internal assessment, independent third-party diligence, and audited financials verified by certified international auditors, alongside a consortium running their own reviews. By July 2026 the finance ministry was explaining that loss to parliament in writing, and the country’s anti-corruption commission had opened an investigation into the loss itself. (South China Morning)

Read that again. A pension fund did everything the textbook says and now defends itself to a legislature.

That is what a fraud does to a region. It does not burn capital. It makes allocating to your part of the world a career risk for the person signing the cheque. Wirecard did this to German fintech. FTX did it to crypto for a full cycle. The honest operators pay a tax levied by someone they never met.

The Bill Arrives Elsewhere

And it arrives somewhere the people who caused it will never look.

In March 2026, several hundred employees at a Jashore facility staged demonstrations demanding three to four months of unpaid wages. The company was Chaldal, which pioneered online grocery in Bangladesh, sitting on a working capital shortfall of Tk40 crore, having quietly cut its workforce from 3,300 to 2,200, and writing to a state fund asking for emergency bridge financing. This is a company that raised around $40 million over a decade and hit $55 million in annual revenue during the pandemic. (Future Startup)

It wasn’t the first. In 2022, Sheba, the country’s largest home services marketplace, missed a foreign round and had to lay off most of its staff to survive. It only came back because local conglomerates stepped in where foreign capital had walked away. (The Daily Star)

Nothing was wrong with either product. People still want groceries delivered. People still need an electrician. The demand did not evaporate. The customers did not leave. What left was the money, and it left for reasons that had nothing to do with either company and everything to do with events three thousand kilometres away.

The numbers underneath tell you exactly what happened. Bangladeshi startups raised over $434 million across 94 deals in 2021. By 2024 that was $42 million across 41 deals. In 2025, headline funding rose to $124 million, but $110 million of it was a single transaction, and the deal count fell to twelve. (The Hans India, The Business Standard)

Ninety-four deals to twelve. That is not a market correcting the price of risk. That is a market that has stopped functioning as a market.

And this is what I mean when I say the region isn’t mature. In a mature ecosystem, a good business with real revenue and real demand does not die because a stranger committed fraud in another country. There are enough sources of capital, enough acquirers, enough debt providers, enough public market depth that the failure of one node does not sever the whole network. Here there is essentially one artery, foreign growth capital, and when it constricts, companies that did everything right start missing payroll.

Fashion, Not Analysis

In 2016 an investor near Raffles Place asked me about the opportunity, nodded politely for twelve minutes, and told me his fund had no mandate for my market.

A mandate is not analysis. It is permission. Nobody can tell a board they allocated because it felt right. They need a category, a precedent, a comparable.

Eighteen months later, after Gojek’s cheque, the same class of investor was calling me. Our unit economics had improved, but not that much. What changed was that someone respectable had gone first.

Now watch it run backwards. Not long ago it was a problem for a regional fund to lack Indonesia exposure. Today that exposure gets explained apologetically in LP letters. In the first half of 2025, Singapore absorbed something like 92 percent of Southeast Asia’s total startup funding. Capital did not leave the region. It fled to the jurisdiction with the clearest rules and hid there. (Visible.vc)

This happened to China in 2021. It happened to India in 2015 and reversed. Mandates lag returns. They are a record of what already worked, formalised. Which gives you two rules. Raise when your geography is fashionable, whether or not you need the money. And understand that when it is toxic, the competition for talent, category and customers is the thinnest it will ever be.

What You Actually Control

In 2019, with sixty days of cash, we cut two hundred people. Half the company. Not underperformers. People still hitting their numbers. We had to execute inside a week, because rolling into the next month meant an extra month of severance we could not fund.

Then we killed every product line that could not pay for itself, froze hiring, cut marketing to nothing. Within three months, core operations were cash-flow positive.

Three months. We could have done that in 2017 and nobody would have died. We didn’t, because capital was cheap and growth was the product we were really selling.

Amazon sold convertible debt into a closing window in 2001 and spent two years defending gross margin. Airbnb took openly humiliating terms in 2020 and stayed alive long enough to make the humiliation irrelevant. None of that is heroism. It’s sequencing.

Four levers, in order. Run every product as its own P&L and be honest about which ones are subsidised. Kill anything without a credible path to positive contribution margin this quarter, not next. Test the price increase you are frightened of, because the churn is usually half what you fear and the margin is immediate. And build a ninety-day cash plan that assumes your next round never arrives, severance arithmetic included, so that if the day comes you are executing a plan instead of discovering one.

I don’t think this region is finished. I think it has run out of the thing it was quietly running on, which was the assumption that the next cheque was coming.

The version of this story where a new fund arrives with a fresh thesis and dry powder is the one everybody wants. I have stopped believing in it. Money follows proof, arrives late, and behaves as though it was early.

The other version is that enough of us build companies durable enough that no single scandal, no single face, no single conviction can reprice an entire region. That is what maturity actually is, and it is measured in artery count, not headline funding. We have one artery. Until we have four, a grocery company in Jashore will keep paying for a fish farm in Bandung.

The book is done. Moving Bangladesh: The Origin Story of Pathao is out today, and after almost four years of writing it, editing it, and living with it, I get to hand it to you.

Four years is a strange amount of time to spend on a book about a company I have already left. I have moved on from Pathao in every practical sense. And yet Pathao has refused to move on from me. The questions keep coming, at dinners, in my inbox, on stages, from founders in Dhaka and students who were children when we launched. How did you start it. How did you get funded. What actually happened at the end. The company became part of how a generation here thinks about what is possible, and that cultural weight means the questions never really stop.

For years I answered them in fragments. A clean anecdote for a podcast. A tidy lesson for a keynote. A single quotable line for an interview. Every one of those formats asks you to compress seven years into something that fits a stage, and every time I did it, I felt the same thing: the real story was getting left on the cutting room floor. The rooftop nights. The reconciliation math every single morning. The friend who backed me first and did not live to see how it turned out. The morning I stood in a room and took two hundred people’s jobs, one office at a time.

A book is the only form honest enough to hold all of that. So I wrote the book.

What is inside

This covers the full seven years, start to finish, told in the order it actually happened rather than the order that flatters me:

• How it really started. The dead courier service, the joke website, the five experiments that had to die on schedule so the sixth one could breathe. Pathao was experiment number six.

• Getting funded. Chasing the first real venture money into a country most investors could not place on a map, and what it took to convince people that a technology company could come out of Bangladesh.

• Scaling. Bikes, cars, and food. The super-app bet. The launches that still feel implausible when I read them back.

• The fall. The part I have never been able to set down, and the part where the book actually begins.

• The rise again. What rebuilding looked like after the loudest failure of my life.

I wrote it with the falls left in. That was the whole point.

How to get it

The book is available two ways:

• Paperback in Bangladesh, for those of you who want the physical copy on the shelf.

• eBook on Amazon, for everyone reading from anywhere else.

Grab your copy here

At that same link you can read the entire first chapter for free. It opens in the room on the worst morning of the whole story. Start there and you will know within a few pages whether this book is for you.

The book starts shipping on 30th July 2026

Discounts!

If you have been a subscriber in this Substack as of 25 July 2026, you get a massive 40% discount! If your emails also have @pathao.com, @fin.com, @…edu.bd, @northsouth.edu, you will also get a 30% discount.

Just enter your email at checkout, verify, and the discount will be automatically applied.

One small asks

If you buy it, I would love for this to be a conversation rather than a broadcast.

If the book lands for you, please leave an early review on Amazon. I will be honest about why this matters: in the first week, a handful of reviews decides whether a book by a first-time author from Dhaka gets seen at all. Two minutes from you does more than you would guess.

Thank you for being here for this. Genuinely.

Elius

My software stack evolves frequently as I experiment with new apps. Here’s my current setup:

Utter (Free) ✨✨✨

AI Powered voice-to-text that I run locally with NVidia Parakeet + Apple Intelligence for cleanup. No lag, since it’s run all locally. Completely changed how I use my computer and write. In fact, I’m writing this using Utter right now :)

Raycast (Free) ✨✨

A collection of powerful productivity tools all within an extendable launcher. Replaced Spotlight + PastePal from before. Do take some time to configure this: I have custom shortcuts for snippets copy and paste search Spotify and more.

Things ($49/forever) ✨

Honestly, Apple Reminders does a great job at a to-do list. However, I’m a sucker for a clean user interface and extensibility that Things offers. I feel like I can design my life around my to-do list instead of the other way around.

Markedit (Free) ✨

MarkEdit is a free Markdown editor, for macOS. It’s just like TextEdit on Mac but dedicated to Markdown. Since I now need to edit Markdown files a lot more to write skills for Claude, a dedicated Markdown app has become necessary

Granola (Free) ✨✨

AI powered note-taking tool that works amazing. I was using it a lot more when it was completely free but now it costs $14/month. I am exploring local alternatives which do exist but nothing that works as good as Granola yet

Switch (Free) ✨✨✨

⌘‑Tab that acts like Alt-Tab in Windows. Minor but great quality of life improvement

Castly (Free) ✨✨

Loom alternative that is free and local. I use it to give quick feedbacks to my team while sharing screen

What I continue using from my 2025 Stack:

Superhuman ($30/mo) ✨✨✨

Superhuman is my go-to email client. It's fast… really fast. Clean interface, intuitive shortcuts, built in AI features and email tracking covers everything I need to go through hundreds of emails every day. Going through all my emails to inbox zero takes a quarter of the usual time, and makes working fun.

Worth it if you are living out of your inbox like me.

Alternatives: Simplehuman (free), Simplify Gmail ($3/mo)

Dashlane ($3.30/mo) ✨✨✨

Never use the same password in more than one site. Dashlane generates strong passwords, autofills credentials and OTPs across all devices, and stores Passkeys (I never want to get ecosystem locked by giving Apple all my password/passkeys).

100% worth the cost of a small coffee per month.

Note: always turn off SMS 2FA in every site. Sim swap attacks are surprisingly accessible.

NordVPN ($90 for 2 years) ✨✨

How one can live in Bangladesh without VPN is beyond me. Unlock accesses to websites and remove yourself from prying eyes. Always on VPN.

Alternatives: Surfshark ($60 for 2 years)

PDF Expert ($140, one-time payment) ✨

Yes, I am one of those guys who pay for PDF Softwares. But if you have to deal with as many PDFs as I do - PDF Expert is excellent. I like editing any PDF files easily (which reduces going back to Docs to make edits and exporting again…) and thus save time.

zCal (Free) ✨✨✨

Free calendly alternative that can support multiple links and multiple calendar accounts. Notion calendar still doesn’t have reusable scheduling links.

Notion Calendar (formerly Cron) (Free) ✨✨✨

Finally, for scheduling, I rely on Cron (Notion Calendar is such a bad name). Again - keyboard shortcuts, speed, simple workflows make it the superhuman for calendars. The time travel feature is such a killer for scheduling meetings before I travel, and the join from menu bar widget is so very helpful.

Cloudflare (Free) ✨✨✨

I manage all my personal websites through Cloudflare. Free unlimited email forwarding + workers help convert any Notion page to a website (makes easy to use landing pages like istomorrowhartal.com). Super simple and fast to use DNS management!

Franz (Free) ✨✨

Managing WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Messenger etc etc as separate apps takes a lot of mental toll. Too many messaging apps! This consolidates all of them into one window.

Hevy (Free or $80/lifetime) ✨✨✨

Workout tracker and planner. Easy to make routines and track progress.

Related, I get my routines from BuiltWithScience

Airalo ✨

e-Sim for iPhone so I can have cheap data on demand wherever I travel. Essential and easy to use for frequent travellers. The pricing of these eSims turn out to be the same or cheaper as you would buy from the airport (I checked).

Referral code that get’s you $3: HUSSAI6543

Daylio ($20/year) ✨✨✨

Been using this for the last 5 years to act as my mini-diary and mood tracker. It’s my minimum viable journal. Only tool I have been paying for 5 consecutive years.

Rabby Wallet (Free) ✨✨✨

The best wallet for all EVM chains. Smooth multi-chain experience and improved secruity as they do a pre-sign check. Makes it easy to manage multiple wallets as well.

Referral code: ELIUS

Alternative: Zerion Wallet for iOS/Android

Headspace ($70/annually)

My go-to meditation app. Andy Puddicombe’s voice always calms me down.

Here’s a hack: if you email their support@, they will more often than not give you a 40% discount. Just ask :)

What has been removed from my 2025 Stack:

• Arc was replaced by Google Chrome, as Arc has been discontinued and Google Chrome now has a sidebar for Tabs. Not exactly the same things, but comes close.

• PastePal/Paste has been replaced by Raycast.

• SideDrive, Height.app Figma has been removed because I don’t use it enough.

Let's first understand "custody".

When you have cash in your wallet, physically with you, you really own the cash. No one else can take it from you - it is yours without a doubt. The cash is self-custodied.

When you have cash in your bank account, the money is custodied by the bank. The banks now own it, it is sitting with them at their vault, and they are giving you access to your money through a cheque book or a debit card.

While legally you own the money in the bank account, that is not technically always the case. The cash that is on the banks balance sheet is their asset, and they can do whatever they want with it - usually, but not limited to, lending it out or creating new money.

Bank failure is not new or uncommon. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost all over the world due to banks not being able to match their assets to liabilities. This happens everywhere from the US to Bangladesh.

Even more worrying, are undue control of private enterprises over your hard earned money.

PayPal in particular has had a long history of freezing people's fund, but nowadays are getting bolder and more judgemental:

Governments are no better, whether it is a "free" economy like Canada

or Pakistan

But the convenience of using digital money and banks has meant that there has not been any real alternatives. Everyone is trapped in this financial system - and it has been impossible to get out of it, without losing basic modern priviledges.

Until now.

A blockchain wallet is locked using a private key and a public key. A public key is something you can share with anyone - and anyone can send you assets to your wallet mapped to the public key. But only someone with the private key can actually access it.

The magic of cryptography means that anyone can generate a public/private key pair. It all takes place in the blockchain in a decentralized manner, and the keys are secured by the blockchain itself. No central authority (like a bank or a PayPal), will have access to your keys - only you do. Any asset that you have in your wallet, can only be accessed and used by you, the holder of the private key, and no one else.

Through blockchain tech, this means for the first time, you can now truly own (self-custody) your digital assets and currencies, while using them with the same convenience of custodial wallets.

The tech for this goes back all the way to 2008 when Bitcoin was released, promising global payments for everyone. Unfortunately, while the tech has always been there, the user convenience hasn't. Public/private keys are long and cryptic, bitcoin is a volatile asset, and fees are erratic (Lightning network fixes some of the challenges, but using it means you will be using a custodial service).

This has been my inspiration for Wind - an uncensorable Web3 native PayPal/Wise, that can used by anyone.

We are partnering with Web3Auth to make key management simple - where your key is broken down in multiple places and only reconstructed when used by the user. Making it simple and convenient for anyone to access your self-custody wallet without the complexity of managing a cryptographic private key.

Wind will provide the simplest way to use self-custody wallets in the market. Most DeFi wallets today are targeted towards crypto natives, Wind is the first wallet that will really be made for the rest of us - that you can use to send, spend, earn or invest, without the complexity of private/public keys and mnemonics, while fully owning your own keys.

Wind also uses smart contract wallets to do gasless transactions (a topic for another day), stablecoins, and efficient on/off ramps to provide a very web2 user interface on top of web3 tech to become an un-censorable wallet for everyone. No one should have to be at the mercy of private corporations or governments to use their own money. Because Wind is self-custodial, no one can block you from accessing your assets, not even Wind.

Self-custody is a core principle that got me excited about building Wind, and I can't wait to showcase the product we are building in the next couple of months.

Until then, you can sign up at our website to get notified of our updates, at https://wind.app/

A lot of our Bangladeshi startups are focused on building apps for the Bangladeshi market - as they should. Bangladesh is still at an early technology curve, and there are huge opportunities both in bringing in proven business models in the country, as well as finding local solutions to local problems.

But one place where I feel that we often miss, is the huge upside of creating SaaS softwares locally, for the international market.

There are many who are trying to build consumer subscription businesses in Bangladesh. But none are yet to take off. And that is simply because of two simple reasons:

• Payments are not easy - No ApplePay, GooglePay, low credit/debit card penetration. Local cards cannot automatically pull money out of cards, restricting automated subscriptions.

• We have been spoilt by free software. Growing up - I never had to pay for software or media. BitTorrent and Pirated CDs > going through the arduous process of licensing an actual software

I have strong belief that these are industry trends that will be changing over time, but I don’t see these barriers simply going away in the next couple years.

India has had huge success in building international pure-play SaaS startups. FreshWorks and Zoho comes to mind. There is an unfair advantage that they will have compared to any of their Silicon Valley peers;-

Labour Arbitrage.

Like India, Bangladesh has amazing and underpriced talent. Every line of code we have in Pathao, has been written in Bangladesh, by Bangladeshi engineers. Over the last 6 years, our technology has allowed us to continuously compete with multiple major international players and outperform them through execution. This gives me a lot of faith in the tech talent of this country.

The unfair advantage comes in play as soon as you are earning in dollars (revenue) and still pay for the talent in taka (salary). If we can even provide 80% of the quality of a keystone product, while charging 50% the price - I believe we will be surprised by the number of customers that it can attract.

In fact we are already doing the same when foreign companies set up a dev shop over here, or outsource their tech needs to Bangladesh. This proves the point that we have the talent. What we sometimes lack, however, is the vision and the courage. There are hundreds of dev teams scattered across the country doing outsourced work for foreign clients, but very few are building their own products. Either we are locked in a scarcity mindset, or are afraid of failure.

This needs to change. It has never been easier to build an MVP and get the first 100 customers. We do not need to artificially limit ourselves just by the geography of where we are born. Startups like Instant, Alice or Apploye are showing the path - and others will need to take their lessons to heart.

It’s time to look outwards.

Let’s build for the world.

In late 2014, early 2015 - Dhaka was going through a very strange political situation.

The opposition party would call hartal (a general strike) for 4-days a week (Sun through Wed), and then very late into Wed they would (sometimes) call for a strike on Thursday.

This - as you can imagine - was all very confusing. Everyone and their moms would look through any source of trying to find news of the hartal or people would ask on social media to random strangers - there just wasn't any reliable and timely information on it. It was imperative to know if there was hartal on that day so people could plan accordingly - most private universities and school were closed on hartals and people's commute plans could change significantly because of it. The lack of clear information would lead to many rumours and misinformation.

On one of these Wednesday's I decided to make a single page website.

It was a very simple site that took 30 minutes to make - but because of the need - it went viral almost immediately.

Pre-Pathao, this one website was a big deal for me. It got me in my first radio shows, I made a few tangible business contacts, and, made for some nice side-money for a struggling college student 👀

The reason today I write about a six year old website is because I wanted to share a few lessons I got even before I started Pathao:

• Before I made the site, I talked about making it with many others. All of them had the time (30 minutes) and resources ($10 domain name) to make this. No one else did.
  
  Lesson: If you have an idea, and can't find a team to execute it - try building the MVP yourself. There are enough tools in the internet for anyone to bring a simple idea to reality.
  
  Lesson: It doesn't take a lot of resources to build the first version. Don't make it complicated.
  

• When I talked about if I should make this - a lot of people were quick to point out different flaws in the model. "People can just go to a news site" "Is this too political?" "What would happen when the hartals are over?"
  
  Lesson: People don't know what they want. It's almost always better to build first and try to sell. The feedback can be used to improve the product.
  
  Lesson: People will pay for convenience even if there are other free alternatives.
  

• I made the website as a joke. Yet, after it did go viral - I was able to monetize it through small ads. Best of all, this was a catalyst for me to eventually partner with Fahim Saleh (who reached out to give an ad for hackhou.se in the site) and eventually led to the creation of Pathao.
  
  Lesson: Memes make money. (Basically how Elon Musk became the richest person in the world) Many good ideas started as a joke - it doesn't need to stay that way.
  
  Lesson: The value of creation is not just through monetization.
  
  Lesson: Be a creator.

The last 36 hours have been unreal.

Absolutely devastated to learn about the death of Fahim Saleh, a founding member of the Pathao team.

Who was Fahim?

Fahim was born in Saudi Arabia to Bengali parents. He grew up in the USA, and started working in tech while he was still a teenager. He was already successful before he even came to Dhaka - launching what is now known as Kickback Apps.

He came to Bangladesh to find his roots and contribute for the country. He established HackHouse, an incubator. He started networking. That’s when me and Adnan first met him. I had made a site back then that got viral - istomorrowhartal.com - and that fascinated him. Adnan, Sadad and myself were doing our own thing- making websites and themes back then. However, Fahim was charismatic, energetic and an optimist. The kind of energy that is contagious. We joined forces.

Together, and with a few more people we launched several projects in a short span of time: DhakaRides, Jaben, JeteChao and more.

Pathao was the one the projects that took hold- co-founded together by myself, Shifat Adnan, and Fahim. The first six to nine months was gruelling. It was an unsexy tech-courier company running out of a literal garage in Chairman Bari (which is now a Pathao walk-in-support centre). We didn’t have much to show - but we had a common vision that pushed us forward. We had our highs and lows. And at our lows - he kept pushing us forward.

Fahim and Pathao

Fahim’s role was invaluable. He was the first “angel” money. We all brainstormed together on what Pathao might become. Back in 2015 - there weren't many/any startups in Bangladesh. So we modeled together how we are going to grow the company. He helped me connect to our first seed investors.

By 2016 we were hitting our stride. We started hiring employees, we bought a 100 bikes and launched Rides. Our drivers and customers were coming online. Everyday we hit a new daily best. It was beautiful.

Fahim had a passion for building new products, finding untapped markets, and identifying promising founders. By 2017, Fahim started spending more time in New York. He established Adventure Capital, and became an angel investor in startups in Bangladesh and around the world.  He invested in JoBike (bicycle-sharing startup) Jatri (public transport ticketing platform), and Alpha Potato (gaming company).  He also backed PiCap, (ride-sharing company), and Muvo (micro-mobility solution) in Colombia.  More recently in 2018, he founded and later became the CEO of Gokada, a ride-sharing and logistics platform in Nigeria.

Fahim’s legacy in Bangladesh

The Pathao that we know would not have come into being without Fahim. The tone of our company - celebrating iterative development, building fast, failing early, pushing boundaries - all stemmed because of him.

Even as his interests took him far and wide - and away from operational or strategic involvement with Pathao - he remained an inspiration for us, the people on the ground.  As a true visionary, he had gone on to build great things, but perhaps his greatest legacy is the community he created here at Pathao.  He dared us to dream, to be bold, to be passionate, and to never stop moving.  The creativity we foster and the relentless focus with which we move forward, is our finest tribute to him.

Fahim, you will be missed.

Investors looking for the next rising star in Asia can look to Bangladesh, a market that isn’t quite on the venture capital radar as of yet, often overshadowed by its more established peers such as India.

On closer inspection, Bangladesh holds great potential to become the next tech frontier, with a small but vibrant startup community working hard to make life easier for the everyday Bangladeshi.

Why Bangladesh?

Bangladesh has had incredible economic growth, with gross domestic product reaching 8 percent last year. Its wealth to-date has been built on two main industries — garment production and overseas remittance.

It is the 8th largest country in the world by population — with a total population of 170 million, living in a country which is only the size of the state of New York. It is not just one of the densest countries in the world, but Dhaka, with 20 million people, is one of the densest cities in the world.

The mobile penetration continues to rise, and mobile internet penetration with it — slating to reach 41 per cent of the population by 2025.

Urbanisation is happening rapidly, and Dhaka’s infrastructure is bursting at the seams. With traffic moving at 7 kilometres an hour and only 3,000 buses plying the roads, the city is in dire need of transportation that is efficient, safe and cheap.

While commuters in Southeast Asia are already familiar with Grab and Gojek, the concept of ride-sharing was completely foreign to Bangladeshis back in 2016.

The idea that someone will pick you up at your doorstep and drop you off at your destination was completely unheard of. The cultural issue of sitting on a stranger’s bike, in a moderate Muslim country, was also pronounced — especially for women.

2015 saw the emergence of ride-hailing solutions in Bangladesh. What this also led to was a cultural and mindset change on how people were ready to commute. It also led to more jobs and hunger to tech talent in the country. Other industries like ecommerce, food delivery, fintech were soon to follow.

Bangladesh has around 90.501 million internet users, as of August 2018. So, ecommerce has huge opportunity to grow here.

With the improvement of living standard and fast-pace of bust urban life shopping behaviour of the consumers have shifted greatly.

One of the growing opportunities is secured payment technologies. It is most crucial for creating a positive mindset amongst the people towards e-commerce.

The most popular mode of payment for customers is still cash on delivery (COD) for ecommerce transactions, as customers are usually uncomfortable completing their transactions by using Digital Payment methods.

Currently in Bangladesh, the volume of e-commerce transactions is about Taka 1700 Crore per year (US$260 million). Still, around 90 per cent of e-commerce transactions are done on COD basis. To get the most out of e-commerce, the amount of online payment needs to be increased.

The startup environment in Bangladesh is nascent but very active, with 200 startups slated to launch every year, most of which are in e-commerce and software development, in a country of 170 million people.

With government-led initiatives like Startup Bangladesh which was launched in 2018, it is encouraging to see more support for entrepreneurship as a viable career choice and in promoting Bangladesh as a global hub for tech entrepreneurship.

Bangladesh is on its journey to become a Digital Nation. The “Vision 2021” of the present government aims to develop Bangladesh into a resourceful and modern economy through efficient use of information and communication technology.

Along with rapid internet adoption, tech savvy young generation, the commitment from the leaders is the most positive sign to build up a successful startup economy.

Key opportunity areas

Some startups have already made significant strides within Bangladesh.

ShopUp, for instance, assists Facebook shop owners by providing services such as deliveries, shop management and loans. It secured an additional US$1.5 million in funding this year from Sequoia.

Deligram provides ecommerce service to rural consumers have recently secured 3 million in funding.

PraavaHealth, a telemedicine startup aiming to raise healthcare standards in Bangladesh, opened its first family health centre in Dhaka in 2017.

E-commerce is another pillar that is growing steadily in Bangladesh. Players like ajkerdeal.com or deligram.com, have in their own played a key role in growing the online experience, which again was nascent in this part of the world till a few years ago.

But as a fairly new entrant in Asia’s startup scene, some challenges remain. Bangladesh is an undercapitalised market — while there is abundant funding for seed stage and early-stage startups, later stage funding is hard to come from local investors.

Like for any growing industry, talent always remains an issue. Tech professionals always prefer their stable, high-paying jobs over joining startups, so good talent is hard to come by. Convincing them to make the switch is an uphill task.

Our startups are also very new to the nature of their work, figuring things out as they go along. That said, the startup community is closely-knit and are constantly sharing ideas. There isn’t a lot of competition as each startup is solving problem sets that are not only unique but are extensive.

And as Bangladesh’s economy opens up, the talent that has left to work overseas are returning. And they are bringing in training, education and different business models that they are exposed to.

There isn’t a formal startup body that supports local founders as yet. But Bangladesh’s startup community frequently engages the local government in conversations about funding and investing in a local ecosystem.

A few local accelerators have also sprung up training first-time founders. The government is adamant in providing an environment for startups to thrive: it has built two high-tech parks, with three more coming on by 2020.

South Asia is increasingly becoming a hotspot for high growth, with growing interest from Chinese, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asian investors like Alibaba, Tencent, Openspace Ventures and more, who have been actively looking at South Asian startups, especially Bangladesh in recent years.

It only goes to show that it is a matter of time before Bangladesh achieves the success Southeast Asia is experiencing right now.

Originally appeared on e27.