We ended the week with a long-form interview of Prabeer Sarkar, Founder and CEO of Dhaka Distributions, a cybersecurity distribution company based in Dhaka. Published an analysis on WebAble Digital, a digital communication service company, on the occasion of its fifth anniversary. That followed an excerpt of an interview with Onnorokom Group co-founder Mahmudul Hasan Sohag. Onnorokom has consumer businesses but it has a very strong enterprise services business as well.
There are some big enterprise opportunities in Dhaka that almost no one is approaching with enough seriousness. One of the consequential developments in tech over the past few years is the rise of big enterprise companies like Trello, Slack, Stripe, Inmobi, FreshWorks, and so on. Due to the dominance of big players like Google and Facebook and Amazon, the consumer tech space has become too steep a market for many startups. Hence B2B became a lucrative outlet for building consequential companies. It has been the case in India, in China, and in many other markets. For example, India has a long list of B2B unicorns such as UDAAN, InMobi, Freshworks and a long list of other very successful B2B companies.
Compared to that Dhaka is a barren land. Bangladesh is behind from these markets on many metrics but the enterprise is a space where there are ample opportunities for entrepreneurs to build but very few people are paying attention. There are some very successful enterprise companies and a long list of software companies working at the nexus of custom software and outsourcing in Dhaka. Some quite successful logistics companies built on the back of ecommerce. Companies like Reve Systems has been doing well. But overall B2B scene is far from fulfilling its potential. If aspiring entrepreneurs pay a little more attention to enterprise space in 2019, something good is likely to come out of it.
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