Hussain Elius, co-founder of Pathao, speaks to Dhaka Tribune’s Wafiur Rahman about life after Pathao, the structural problems holding back Bangladesh’s startup ecosystem, lessons from building one of the country’s biggest tech companies, and the void left by his friend and early backer Fahim Saleh.
What are you working on now, and how is it different from Pathao?
Since Pathao, I started Wind, a cross-border payments company built on blockchain rails. The pitch is simple: move money across borders faster, cheaper and more transparently than the correspondent banking system, which typically charges 3% to 5% and settles slowly. The company was acquired by Fin.com in the US in 2024.
The difference from Pathao wasn’t just the product; it was the entire operating mode. Pathao was a street fight: riders, red helmets, no rulebook, building trust with a population that had never split a fare with an app before.
Wind is quieter and more technical. There are no drivers to onboard or traffic police to negotiate with. Instead, there are compliance regimes, banking partners and licensing conversations, because this time we’re moving other people’s money, not just their packages.
I also recently released Moving Bangladesh: The Origin Story of Pathao, a business book and biography about how we built the company. It is the unfiltered, tactical reality of scaling Pathao, not the version that ends up in press releases, and the lessons we learned from building one of Bangladesh’s largest tech companies.
It has been nearly four years since you had an active role at Pathao. From the outside, what do you see as its biggest opportunities and challenges?
I’ll caveat this properly: I’ve been out of the operating seat since 2021, so take this as an informed outsider’s read, not an insider’s.
The opportunity is that the current funding winter is brutal for the ecosystem, but it’s arguably good news for the strongest incumbent in it.
When capital is scarce, weaker, capital-dependent competitors get forced into the open -- unpaid wages, shrinking headcounts, emergency requests to state funds.
Pathao has already survived its own near-death experience in 2019 and came out the other side disciplined about unit economics. It is structurally in a better position to consolidate market share while others are just trying to make payroll.
That’s a speculative read on my part, since I don’t have their internal numbers anymore, but it’s consistent with how these cycles usually play out.
The challenge is that the ceiling I wrote about in the book hasn’t moved. Bangladesh is roughly three cities’ worth of addressable ride and delivery demand.
Rapido in India expanded into a hundred cities and is now worth multiples of Pathao’s peak valuation, largely because India kept giving them a next city to enter.
Pathao’s fourth market was Nepal, not because it was the biggest opportunity, but because it was the only one left that made sense to reach without a bigger balance sheet.
Whatever Pathao does next -- fintech, deeper logistics infrastructure for the rest of the ecosystem, more of Nepal -- it has to solve the same problem I never fully solved: how do you build something Bangladesh-sized into something regionally or globally sized without the capital that usually funds that jump?
Looking back, what would you have done differently at Pathao?
Yes, and it’s not the thing people usually guess. It wasn’t the spending, the hiring pace or even the layoffs. Those were mistakes too, but they were forced mistakes, made under real constraints.
The real one was this: when we had the cash and momentum to push into a genuinely large market, we expanded into a small one.
We went to Nepal instead of India.
At the time, it was the obviously sensible choice -- geographically close, culturally similar, and our playbook ported over almost unchanged.
That’s exactly what made it the wrong call.
By the time I understood what that decision cost us, cheap global capital had dried up. Grab and Gojek had Southeast Asia locked down, while Uber, Ola and Rapido had India locked down. We didn’t have the runway or the energy to fight a second war in someone else’s backyard.
If I’m being honest with myself, that single choice -- safe over ambitious, at the one moment we had the resources to be ambitious -- mattered more to Pathao’s ceiling than any operational decision we made in seven years.
Why hasn’t Bangladesh’s startup ecosystem evolved as expected? What are we missing?
The answer isn’t about talent or ideas. It’s about what happens after a startup runs out of money, or after it needs a real exit.
In deep-capital markets, a struggling company has options: a strategic buyer, a bridge round, sometimes even a public listing on growth metrics alone.
In Bangladesh, none of those exist at scale. The public market isn’t deep enough for a real tech IPO. There’s no meaningful base of strategic acquirers.
The local investor community is small and genuinely risk-averse, not irrationally so; they just don’t have the balance sheets to absorb frontier-market losses. And foreign capital shows up late, conditional on proof that a cash-burning company usually can’t produce yet.
I call this the “Bangladesh Tax”: every company here that depends on outside capital to survive pays it, one way or another.
There’s a second, less visible layer: the LP mandate problem.
Global venture capital doesn’t flow because a fund manager personally likes your pitch. It flows because a fund has a documented mandate -- geography, stage, sector -- that a pension fund or endowment board signed off on.
Bangladesh, for most of the last decade, simply wasn’t inside anyone’s mandate.
That’s not a judgment on the quality of the founders or ideas. It is a structural fact about how institutional capital gets allocated.
Every market that eventually gets a mandate -- Vietnam, Indonesia a decade ago -- started without one. Someone has to be the first deal that gives the next fund a comparable to point to when they go back to their own LPs.
Are VCs more receptive to Bangladeshi startups now? Has the perception changed following the troubles at companies such as Chaldal?
I’d separate two things that are easy to conflate here: sentiment and mandate.
Sentiment has clearly gotten worse in the short term.
Chaldal was, by reputation, one of the most disciplined operators in the country, and its 2026 liquidity crisis -- unpaid wages, protests outside the Jessore facility, a Tk40 crore working-capital shortfall, an emergency request to Startup Bangladesh that reportedly fell through -- is being read by longtime sceptics as vindication that the whole “startup boom” narrative was overstated.
That reaction is happening in real time on social media and in the trade press, and it’s not helping anyone currently raising.
But the deeper issue, the mandate problem I mentioned earlier, was never really about perception, and I don’t think one company’s stress, however prominent, moves it much either way.
Bangladesh not being inside most global funds’ investable geography wasn’t a verdict on Chaldal, Pathao or ShopUp specifically. It was a structural fact before any of these companies existed.
My somewhat speculative read is that Chaldal’s troubles will sting locally and will be cited by critics for a while, but they’re unlikely to be the deciding factor in whether international capital allocators add Bangladesh to their mandates.
What actually moves that needle is a handful of clean, comparable exits, the kind that let a fund manager tell their own LPs: “This is a known, investable category now.”
We haven’t had enough of those yet.
What should Bangladeshi startup founders keep in mind when pitching for funding?
A few things I wish someone had told me plainly when I started out.
First, understand the fundraising stack and don’t skip layers. Most advice jumps straight from “get an angel” to “raise a Series A” as if they sit next to each other. They don’t.
There’s a middle layer, expert individual capital without a fund’s formal structure: super angels, family offices, people who invest on conviction and relationships rather than a mandate. Know which layer you’re actually talking to, and pitch accordingly.
Second, a “no” is often about the fund’s mandate, not your company. Some of the sharpest investors I sat across from passed on Pathao, not because the analysis was weak, but because their fund’s structure genuinely couldn’t hold a frontier-market position on the timeline required.
Don’t over-update on a rejection without knowing which kind it was.
Third, sell the market before you sell the company if you’re outside the mapped geographies. I used to walk into rooms in Singapore and spend the first 20 minutes explaining why Bangladesh mattered before I ever got to Pathao.
That’s still true for most Bangladeshi founders today.
Investors can’t underwrite a company in a market they can’t picture.
Fourth, build the unit economics story before you build the growth story. The single best piece of advice I ignored came from a Russian investor who told me in 2018 to “be a cockroach, not a unicorn.”
Know your break-even volume for every product line before you launch the next one.
Investors trust a founder who’s choosing to grow faster with their capital far more than one who needs it to survive.
Finally, fundraise yourself. Don’t outsource it. Every time I’ve seen a founder hand fundraising to an external hire or a CFO, it’s gone badly.
No one can sell your company’s conviction the way you can, and no serious investor backs a company whose CEO isn’t personally the one asking.
Do you miss working with Fahim Saleh? What did his death take away from Bangladesh’s startup ecosystem?
Fahim was the first person who bet on me, before there was a “Bangladesh startup ecosystem” for anyone to bet on.
He said yes to sponsoring a joke website I made for $200 before he’d ever met me. That instinct, seeing a person rather than a market, isn’t something institutional capital is built to do.
Without him, I don’t know if I aim as high, as early, or if I ever end up in the rooms that eventually built Pathao.
What his death took from Bangladesh’s startup scene is harder to see from the outside, and I think it’s the part that gets missed.
Fahim wasn’t only backing Pathao. He was the person a handful of other founders called when a round wasn’t closing, when a key hire fell through, when someone needed a person who’d actually done it to tell them it was going to be okay.
When he died, that support beam went with him.
Some of those companies made it through anyway. Most didn’t.
The real cost isn’t just the companies he built; it’s the companies that never got the chance to start because the person who would have made the first, irrational, conviction-based bet on them wasn’t there anymore.
That’s a harder loss to put a number on than anything on a cap table.
