How Bangladesh’s global talent returned to build startups at home

When Waseem Alim started Chaldal, he chose half an apartment in Gulshan as his office, crammed with five people and the smell of groceries going warm in the Dhaka heat. 

It was 2013. He had recently left a job at a Silicon Valley fintech firm where his software monitored over a hundred billion dollars in brokerage assets. 

Now he was logging onion orders by hand and, on bad nights, driving through flooded backroads to deliver a package to a destination that a motorcycle could not reach. Once he missed his wedding anniversary because a car was stuck in mud so deep it took three hours and chains to free it.

Waseem was, by almost any definition, acting against his own interests. And yet he had a theory. "Business is possible in Bangladesh," he said to himself, "and there are many opportunities." 

The economy, as he saw it, was a mess of information asymmetry and avoidable friction — goods stuck in transit, prices collapsing or spiking because nobody had the data to predict either. He wanted to build, as he put it, "an operating system for the economy." He started with groceries.

The question this story asks is whether Waseem — and the growing number of Bangladeshis who have made similarly dramatic reversals of fortune — are building something that will outlast the considerable forces arrayed against them.

Bangladesh, a nation of 180 million people, has in the past decade developed an unlikely reputation as a laboratory for South Asian entrepreneurship. A median age of 28, a rapidly expanding middle class, and one of the fastest rates of mobile-internet adoption in the developing world have made it a compelling destination on paper. But the story that animates this report is not about demographics. 

It is about a specific kind of person: the Western-educated Bangladeshi who walked away from comfort and clarity and flew home to build something — often into the face of bureaucratic indifference, political upheaval, and a funding market that can turn overnight from optimistic to catastrophic.

A building collapses, a man decides

For Waseem, the decision crystallised around a tragedy he watched from abroad. On 24 April 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory in Savar collapsed, killing over a thousand workers. 

Waseem — who had studied at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania before working at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and a San Francisco fintech startup — remembers the question that would not leave him: Is it really that difficult to make money in Bangladesh while doing things the right way?

To answer that question, he and two colleagues founded Chaldal, and started delivering groceries with five orders a day. A decade later, the company had grown to over 3,000 employees, 27 warehouses, and a reputation as the most sophisticated grocery-delivery operation in the country — its one-hour delivery window backed by a proprietary warehouse-picking system that Waseem believed had no direct peer in the world.

Chaldal has raised a total of $30 million across nine funding rounds, securing capital from major backers like Y Combinator, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Startup Bangladesh, and Xploration Capital.

But Chaldal's trajectory also illustrates what can happen when ambition collides with a hostile macro environment. 

By early 2026, the company faced a serious liquidity crisis — unpaid wages, reduced headcount, and an emergency financing request to a state-run fund. 

Monthly revenues remain around Tk40 crore, but a major investor withdrew in 2022, the taka had come under pressure, import costs had spiked, and a devastating internet blackout during the political upheaval of mid-2024 had threatened thousands of tons of perishable inventory. Each blow, manageable in isolation, proved catastrophic in sequence.

"The market is not very welcoming here. A lot of my time goes into navigating bureaucracy. That is not the best use of my skills," said Waseem. 

Asked about claims that employees had not been paid for four months, Waseem replied, "No, it's not true. As of 10 March, February salaries are outstanding, along with part of January's. We have been in several funding conversations — things slowed around the election period, but have now accelerated. We could not distribute December and January salaries properly, but we expect that to resolve soon. We have cleared December, and mostly February and part of January remain.

"The last couple of years, the entire business ecosystem was chaotic — we managed through it, and now, toward the end, some of that chaos has piled up. We are distributing salaries in tiers, clearing those with lower salaries first," Waseem added.

He reflected on all of it with striking candour. 

Waseem says he became more humble by watching brilliant people in Bangladesh work hard for the right reasons. He also became more honest about the opportunity cost. Building in Bangladesh required fighting battles — bureaucratic, political, logistical, even security issues — that consumed the time and energy he would rather have spent designing systems. 

"It's like the difference between running on land and swimming in water," he said. The water, he implies, has not yet been drained.

A clinic built on trust

Sylvana Quader Sinha had never lived in Bangladesh before she moved here to start a healthcare service provider. 

Raised in Virginia, she attended Wellesley College, earned a law degree from Columbia and a master's in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School. She worked as a corporate lawyer at two international firms, consulted for the World Bank, and served as a foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. 

Bangladesh, in those years, was her heritage, not her address.

That changed in 2011, when her mother fell ill during a family visit to Dhaka. No amount of money, she later wrote in the Harvard Business Review, could guarantee high-quality healthcare. 

It was not a shortage of doctors that struck her. It was the absence of a system you could trust: consistent quality, transparent pricing, the sense that the institution had been designed around the patient.

She spent three years developing a business plan, then moved to Dhaka — for the first time — to open Praava Health in 2018. By 2024, it had served over 700,000 patients and been recognised by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer, cited by the Gates Foundation, and used as a case study at Harvard and Columbia business schools.

Praava Health has raised a total of $25.6 million across several funding rounds, which notably includes a $10.6 million Series A Prime round.

Her advice to diaspora Bangladeshis is deliberately unromantic: come back for the long game, with resilience and humility. 

"You can't copy-paste models from Silicon Valley," she said. "The goal isn't importing ideas. It's adapting global standards to local realities." 

Sylvana also acknowledges the resistance that awaits anyone who tries to disrupt an established industry without the backing of the traditional establishment — or the biography of someone born and raised in Bangladesh. She built through it. "If the mission is worthwhile," she says, "it's always worth doing."

The bridge builder

Shafqat Islam never quite returned to Bangladesh. But he never fully left, either. 

Born in Thailand to UN-employed Bangladeshi parents, raised in Switzerland, and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, he rose to Vice President at Merrill Lynch before quitting the day before his wedding to co-found NewsCred, a content marketing platform, in 2008.

What made NewsCred's story relevant here was its office, which was its largest; not the one in New York or London, but in Dhaka. 

Shafqat's bet was not on Bangladesh as a consumer market but as a talent pool — a source of engineers and product thinkers who could build a world-class product at a fraction of the cost of building it in San Francisco. 

When Optimizely acquired the company in 2021 in what Shafqat described as the largest exit in Bangladeshi startup history, the Dhaka office remained. He still runs it today as Optimizely's president. 

At its peak, NewsCred's Dhaka office (which was later rebranded as Welcome before being acquired by Optimizely) had around 200 full-time employees.

Now, from Gulshan Centre Point office, Optimizely employees work with major global brands, including Starbucks, Nike and GAP. They offer comprehensive marketing solutions that span the entire marketing lifecycle, covering content creation, publishing, measurement, optimisation, running A/B tests, and analytics.

"We did not just want to make a company that would sell products in the Bangladeshi market," he said. "Our ambition was always to build a global company," he added. "Entrepreneurship is insane perseverance in the face of complete resistance," he said as advice for the individuals who want to follow his path. 

Coming back without being called

Shah Naveen Ahmed is 30 years old. He studied at York University in Toronto, returned to Dhaka in 2018, and has since built a few businesses — including car marketplace MotorTrader, an immigration services firm connecting clients with lawyers across Canada and the Gulf, and BPO company BrightBench Technologies, which helps Canadian firms recruit talent in Bangladesh. 

One venture, a cloud kitchen, failed. He regards that as part of the cost of doing business here.

What Ahmed brought back from Canada was not a disruption theory but a set of habits: the work ethic, the customer-service standard, the willingness to do work that a certain Bangladeshi professional culture considers beneath its station. 

"Abroad, no job is considered small," he said. "Many of us did odd jobs during our student years. That teaches humility." His grandfather's saying has become his credo: sacrifice is the key to mastering anything.

What they are building into

Bangladesh's startup ecosystem, in the cold language of venture capital, has had a brutal few years. 

Funding collapsed from a record $415 million in 2021 to roughly $41 million in 2024 — a six-year low — as political upheaval, currency pressure, and a global interest-rate environment hostile to early-stage investing all converged. 

Domestic investor participation, never robust, fell by 95% in a single year.

The returnees are building into this. Each of them, in a different way, is making the same argument: the structural problems are not obstacles to the market. They are the market. 

The absence of a reliable grocery-delivery system, a trustworthy clinic, an affordable software platform, a professional-grade recruitment firm — these are gaps, and gaps are opportunities for people who know what filling them looks like.

What the Western-educated founders carry is trust capital. They have seen, firsthand, what a functional institution looks like. They can build a version of it inside their own companies even when the country around them has not yet managed to do so. 

Waseem Alim built a system so disciplined that, by his own account, even he could not bypass it. Sylvana Quader Sinha built a clinic where consistent care was the standard, not the exception. Shafqat Islam built a Dhaka-based engineering team competing with teams in New York.

None of this has been easy. None of it is finished. The water, in Waseem's metaphor, has not been drained from the pool. But these founders here are still running.

They are all, in their different ways, making the same argument. It is an argument that the current funding environment has made it harder to sustain, and that the political upheavals of recent years have made it costlier to pursue. 

But the argument itself has not changed. Bangladesh is a hard place to build something that lasts. It is also a place of 180 million people who need the things these founders are trying to build.

That tension — between the difficulty and the need — is what brought them back. It is what keeps them here.