Shohoz, the Dhaka-based ride-sharing, and online ticketing platform, announced today that it has raised US$15 million pre-series B investment led by Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures. Other investors participated in this round include Linear VC, 500 Startups and Singaporean angel investor Koh Boon Hwee. Shohoz lets consumers book car and motorbike rides for their daily commute, reserve bus seats, ferry, and even buy movie tickets from its website and app. It plans to use the fresh capital for customer acquisition, retention, and expansion into other on-demand services.
Shohoz aims to create a single platform that will provide the most convenient and simple solutions to help consumers solve their daily needs and hassles. It has previously hinted that it wants to become a ‘super-app’ to provide all major on-demand services like transportation, food, medicine, financial services, bus tickets, and more — all within one app.
Shohoz, funded by European and American tech angels, started its digital ticketing platform in 2014. It got into the ride-hailing business in early 2018. Within 6 months, Shohoz has become one of the dominant ride-sharing players, with rapid expansion plans into other services, such as food delivery and financial services. The startup currently is a team of 200 people in tech, marketing, operations.
“Shohoz means easy in Bengali. Our tagline is ‘Make life easy’. When we started Shohoz in 2014, our vision was to evolve into the number one online destination for Bangladeshis,” explains Maliha Quadir, founder and Managing Director of Shohoz. “We started with tickets, added ride-sharing in 2018, and are now executing on a grander “super-app” strategy. To help Shohoz finance this growth, Shohoz has brought onboard a great lineup of experienced international and regional investors that bring tremendous consumer technology experience, strategic foresight on technology trends in the region, and deep networks which will help us expedite the evolution of our Shohoz super app.”
“We’re honored to join Maliha and her team in their journey to grow Shohoz into the leading transportation and consumer platform in Bangladesh,” explains Justin Hall, Partner at Golden Gate Ventures. “Today Bangladesh has all the indicators of a country poised for tremendous growth: increasing digitization of consumer services, rising consumer purchasing power, and an incredibly dense, urbanizing population. Shohoz is emerging at just the right time and place to completely dominate the consumer landscape in Bangladesh.”
According to, Vishal Harnal, General Partner at 500 Startups, “Shohoz has, in record time, become one of the dominant personal transportation and ride-sharing platforms in Bangladesh. Having invested in similar category-leading companies in other markets, we’re confident that Maliha and her team are on their way to building one of Bangladesh’s most valuable and desirable technology companies that will significantly improve the way Bangladeshis travel, work and live.”
“Shohoz has been successfully implementing innovative projects that are playing a big role in our Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s vision for a Digital Bangladesh. This investment comes at a time where the local tech startup scene is booming and we are seeing increased investor interest in our economy of 160 million people and as such it’s a significant milestone for our local tech ecosystem”, said ICT state minister Zunaid Ahmed Palak.
“FDI in Bangladesh has tripled over last 3 years. This is the largest investment by a VC in Bangladesh to date, we are very excited to be welcoming our new investors and we wish Maliha and her team all the best,” said Kazi M. Aminul Islam, Executive Chairman of Bangladesh Investment Development Authority.
Bangladesh provides a particularly rich market for ride-sharing, thanks to its similarities with Indonesia in terms of dense, urban populations, poor transportation infrastructure (e.g., no subways, no large taxi-players), and people’s need to earn extra income. With its 160MM-strong population, Bangladesh represents enormous demand for consumer-facing services like ride-sharing, food delivery, and other financial services. As an affirmation of these trends, Alibaba recently invested in mobile payments platform bKash and Daraaz, the online ecommerce venture started by Rocket Internet. Recent studies by international organizations like BCG, HSBC, and the World Economic Forum have all cited the rise of Bangladesh as a next key Asian market.
Maliha Quadir started Shohoz at the end of 2014 with the mission to make life simpler for the common Bangladeshis, first by digitizing long-distance transport operators and offering bus tickets online. Maliha, a Harvard Business School graduate, is a veteran of the digital business, who previously worked for Nokia and Vistaprint out of Singapore, where she helped grow their respective businesses across APAC. She began her career at Morgan Stanley, working in Mergers & Acquisitions in the United States. She was named a ‘Young Global Leader’ by the World Economic Forum in 2017.
Update on September 24th: This story has been updated with new information.
