Our latest collection of founder interviews, featuring founders of AmarLab, Sheba, SWAP, and Interactive Cares, offers insights into what happens at growth-stage companies—when companies seek to leverage the escape velocity and move to the next stage. Each interview provides instructive insights into putting your company on a growth trajectory and managing a fast-growing organization and much more.
Amarlab is an on-demand at-home pathology service company. Founded in 2017, the company has experienced excellent growth within a short period of time. We featured Amarlab about a year ago at the beginning of the global coronavirus pandemic. Like every other digital service, the digital healthcare landscape in Bangladesh has since changed 360 degrees. Today, people are simply more open to trying digital services which was not the case before.
Owing to the shifts in the market and a relentless focus on growth, Amarlab is a different company today. In the last one year, the company has seen 6X growth across all important metrics, raised half a million in pre-seed investment, and expanded its operations in two cities outside Dhaka.
We recently sat down with Amarlab co-founder and CEO Tazin Shadid to understand where the company stands today, its evolution, growth, and strategic ambition. We discuss Amarlab’s product, team, business, strategic direction, growth, priorities, fundraising, challenges, culture, and much more.
Adnan Imtiaz Halim is the co-founder and CEO of Sheba Platform Limited. Sheba is a fascinating company with fast-growing products in three different verticals: B2B commerce, on-demand service marketplace, and enterprise SaaS. While three businesses namely sManager, Sheba.xyz, and sBusiness appear separate from the outside, the company says there is an underlying thread that connects all three and that it is building an ecosystem.
Sheba turned five in July last year. Began as an online service marketplace, it has evolved into an entirely different company with a controlled service marketplace and multiple B2B software products. Past years have been eventful for Sheba with expected and serendipitous turns and twists, which makes for an exciting story.
In this excellent interview, Future Startup’s Ruhul Kader sits down with Sheba CEO Adnan Imtiaz Halim to dive deep into Sheba’s journey so far, where the company stands today, its strategic ambition going forward, and much more.
Adnan Imtiaz Halim is the co-founder and CEO of Sheba Platform Limited. Sheba is a fascinating company with fast-growing products in three different verticals: B2B commerce, on-demand service marketplace, and enterprise SaaS. While three businesses namely sManager, Sheba, and sBusiness appear separate from the outside, the company says there is an underlying thread that connects all three and that it is building an ecosystem.
Last week, we published part one of a fascinating interview with Adnan, where we covered Sheba’s journey, where the company stands today, and its strategic ambition going forward.
Today, we are publishing the second and final part of the interview, where we go deeper into Sheba’s bets in B2B commerce, enterprise SaaS, and on-demand service. We discuss the state of Shabe’s three main products, how each business works, the Sheba ecosystem, challenges and upsides for the company, Sheba’s growth equation, the importance of moving fast, Adnan's lessons in entrepreneurship, and much more. Read part one of this interview here.
SWAP is a fascinating company and operates in an equally fascinating vertical — recommerce. We first featured SWAP in May 2021. The company has since evolved. It has raised a new round of investment — $1.25 million in seed funding, led by Accelerating Asia, expanded into three new verticals, acquired a minority stake in an ecommerce company called BDhotdeals, and doubled down on growth.
In this interview with SWAP founder and CEO Parvez Hossain — our second interview with Mr. Parvez, we discuss SWAP’s evolving business, recent expansions, operational dynamics and business fundamentals, strategic ambition, and future plans, and explore dynamics of the recommerce industry in Bangladesh, challenges and opportunities in the industry, competitive landscape and potential trajectory, and much more.
Rare Al Samir is the founder and CEO of Dhaka-based edtech startup Interactive Cares. Interactive Cares operates at the intersection of skills development, select test preparation, and competitive exams. The company collaborates with experts for creating courses and says it has experienced phenomenal growth in the past two years.
In this interview with Mr. Samir, we try to learn about his path to entrepreneurship, the origin and early days of the company, dive deep into where the company stands today, its products and services, strategic ambition, and much more.
Cover photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
