There is a particular kind of optimism that afflicts coverage of emerging digital economies. The tendency to treat growth metrics as a proxy for structural transformation. Manufactured hype. Optimistic hypotheses without any real basis.
Bangladesh generates a lot of that optimism. Internet penetration, mobile subscriptions, e-commerce volumes, MFS accounts, the trend lines all point up and to the right. It's tempting to write a triumphalist narrative and call it analysis.
It would be premature to do so. The harder and more useful question isn't whether Bangladesh's digital economy is growing. It clearly is. The question is what kind of growth this is: Are the fundamentals strengthening in ways that compound, or is the country riding a global tide of cheap smartphones and improving connectivity that every developing economy is riding at once?
This distinction matters because it determines what policymakers, founders, and investors should actually do.
A country building structural advantages, deep digital literacy, indigenous product companies, and robust payment infrastructure, faces a different set of priorities than one whose growth is mostly driven by platform adoption.
Both can look similar from the outside at a given moment.
What follows is an attempt to map the actual state of Bangladesh's digital economy: the structural forces that enabled it, where real value is being created, and, honestly, where the constraints are binding. We'll try to be specific where the data supports specificity, and honest where it doesn't.
To understand where Bangladesh is going, it's worth being precise about what actually enabled the digital economy to take off.
Three forces matter most, and they reinforce each other.
Mobile-first connectivity: Bangladesh is a mobile-first nation in the most literal sense. According to the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), total internet subscribers reached 131 million by December 2023, of whom 118.49 million access the internet via mobile. Broadband accounts for just 12.88 million, a rounding error by comparison.
This didn't happen by accident. The decisive early event was the launch of Grameenphone in collaboration with Grameen Telecom on March 26, 1997, and the subsequent Village Phone program that brought mobile connectivity to rural areas at a time when the technology was effectively a luxury good for the urban elite.
That program created a distribution logic, agent-based, trust-driven, cash-in-hand, that would be replicated almost verbatim by bKash fifteen years later.
By early 2024, approximately 51.77% of mobile users were on smartphones, up from 47% the previous year. The GSMA projected this to reach 62% by 2025. Entry-level Android handsets are now available below $30, which has functionally eliminated the device barrier for most of the country.
The remaining barrier is data cost and literacy, which is a different and harder problem.
The practical consequence of this mobile-first structure is that Bangladesh leapfrogged the desktop internet entirely. The country went from minimal connectivity to mobile broadband without a meaningful PC-internet era in between.
This shapes everything downstream: the user experience of most digital products must work on a mid-range Android phone on a 4G connection, not a laptop on fibre.
Companies that understand this build differently.
A young, aspirational population: Approximately 65% of Bangladesh's 173.8 million people are under 35. This is an often-cited figure, but the mechanism it drives is worth thinking through carefully.
A large youth cohort means a large number of people forming digital habits for the first time. People who don't have to unlearn previous behaviors and who have strong incentives to adopt digital services (convenience, access to opportunities, entertainment).
Bangladesh is also one of Facebook's largest markets globally, with 52.9 million users as of early 2024. YouTube had 33.6 million.
These are enormous numbers for a population where a meaningful share still lacks reliable internet access.
The implication is that digital engagement in Bangladesh is highly concentrated among the connected cohort, and that cohort is very engaged.
The economic context matters here, too. GDP growth averaging 6–7% annually over the past decade has produced a rising middle class projected to reach 34 million by 2025.
Remittances, Bangladesh receives substantial inflows from workers in the Gulf and Southeast Asia, have created surprising pockets of purchasing power in rural areas, often beyond what income surveys capture. These are real demand drivers, not aspirational ones.
A pro-digital policy environment (with caveats): The previous government's digital agenda, launched in 2009, produced tangible infrastructure: 8,500 digital centers at the union level, mostly defunct, a national fiber backbone, and regulatory frameworks that enabled MFS to scale. The direction of policy has generally been right.
The caveats are significant, though, and we'll address them in the constraints section. Policy intent and policy execution are different things.
There are significant policy gaps across the digital landscape. PayPal remains unavailable. Global payment integration remains a challenge.
The tax environment for digital services is complex. These aren't minor frictions; they have measurable effects on the ecosystem's ability to compete globally.
Digital payments: If you had to identify the single development most responsible for unlocking Bangladesh's digital economy, it would be Mobile Financial Services, and specifically, bKash.
The numbers have become extraordinary. By December 2024, total MFS accounts across Bangladesh exceeded 238 million, in a country of roughly 174 million people, which tells you something about multi-account usage and the depth of penetration. Total MFS transaction value in 2024 reached Tk 17.37 lakh crore, a 28.42% increase year-on-year.
More remarkably, Bangladesh processed approximately 8.61% of global daily mobile money transactions in 2024, despite representing just 2.19% of the world's population. bKash alone accounts for 3.8% of global mobile money users.
These are not minor-economy statistics.
The reason this matters beyond the headline numbers is that payment infrastructure functions as a platform: once it exists, it makes adjacent services viable that weren't before.
Before bKash, the cost and friction of collecting payment from a customer in Sylhet for a product sold from Dhaka was prohibitive for a small merchant. After bKash, it isn't. This is why e-commerce, food delivery, ride-hailing, and gig platforms all accelerated after MFS reached scale; the payment problem was solved.
bKash, valued at over $2 billion in its most recent funding round (which included SoftBank Vision Fund II's $250 million investment in 2021), is Bangladesh's only tech unicorn. The company posted a profit of Tk 315.77 crore in 2024, a 67% year-on-year increase. It is now expanding well beyond P2P transfers: digital loans (over 5.5 million loans disbursed to approximately 1 million customers), savings accounts (over 3.2 million DPS accounts opened via bKash), and insurance. It is, increasingly, a financial super-app.
The structural risk here is concentration. 13 MFS providers operate in Bangladesh, but bKash and Nagad dominate. Nagad's situation is more complicated. Bangladesh Bank placed it under administrator management in August 2024 following governance concerns, which effectively means bKash holds a commanding market position with limited competitive pressure.
For users, this is fine for now. For the long-term health of the ecosystem, it warrants watching.
| Metric | 2023 | 2024 |
| Total MFS Accounts | 220.4 million (Dec) | 238+ million (Dec) |
| Total MFS Transaction Value | Tk 13.52 lakh crore | Tk 17.37 lakh crore (+28.4%) |
| Share of Global Daily Transactions | — | ~8.61% |
| bKash Digital Loans Disbursed (cumulative) | — | 5.5 million (to ~1M customers) |
Bangladesh's digital economy is often described in aggregate: a market size, a growth rate, a category of e-commerce or edtech. This level of abstraction obscures more than it reveals. What's actually happening, sector by sector, is more textured and more interesting.
The B2C e-commerce market reached approximately $6.6 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to $7.5 billion in 2024, with a CAGR of 6.78% through 2028.
The major players span a now-familiar range: Daraz (Alibaba-owned, the closest thing to a market leader), Chaldal (grocery, which has built genuine operational capability in last-mile delivery), Pickaboo (electronics, notably capital-efficient: it built a real business on just $3.1 million in total funding), and Rokomari (books and beyond, which has maintained surprising durability).
B2B players like ShopUp and PriyoShop are working to digitize the supply chain for small retailers.
The honest assessment here is that e-commerce has underperformed expectations, not in absolute terms, but relative to the investment and optimism the sector attracted.
Despite its potential, the B2C sector has received less than $200 million in total investment, well below comparable markets like Indonesia or Vietnam. The reasons aren't mysterious: logistics infrastructure outside Dhaka is genuinely hard, consumer trust in online purchases took real damage from post-pandemic fraud, and the market remains primarily urban.
The more interesting recent trend is the move by digital-first companies into offline presence. Pickaboo, Khaas Food, Truck Lagbe, and others have opened physical stores and service centers.
This isn't a retreat; it's a recognition that trust, in Bangladesh, is still built in person. Physical touchpoints serve as trust signals that unlock digital adoption. A company like Khaas Food, which started as an online safe-food brand and now operates nearly 20 offline stores, is playing both channels because that's how the market actually works.
Bangladesh's IT and ITES sector doesn't get the same attention as consumer e-commerce, but it may be the more structurally significant story. The country's digital services export sector reached $1.4 billion in 2024, growing at 40% annually. IT and ITES exports in FY22 alone reached $592 million — nearly double the amount from prior years.
According to BASIS, roughly 4,500 software and ITES companies operate in the country, exporting to approximately 80 countries. The US accounts for 34% of software exports.
The BPO sector has been particularly consistent. It grew from $4 million in revenue when it launched in 2008 to over $700 million by 2022, sustained by roughly 20–24% year-on-year growth and a structural cost advantage: BPO labor in Bangladesh runs around $8/hour versus $15–20 in India or the Philippines. The EU, US, and Japan remain the primary markets.
Bangladesh also ranks second globally in online labor supply, accounting for approximately 16% of global freelancers according to the Oxford Internet Institute. Payoneer ranks Bangladesh eighth globally for freelancing income, with the ICT Division estimating the sector at nearly $1 billion annually.
The constraint, which we'll address shortly, is that the absence of PayPal and complex cross-border payment processes costs freelancers meaningful income and creates friction that India and the Philippines don't face.
Three sectors deserve attention not because they've arrived, but because the structural problem they're attacking is large enough that even partial digital solutions create real value.
In health, companies like DocTime, AmarLab, MedEasy, and Arogga are unbundling healthcare, online consultations, at-home diagnostics, and medicine delivery, for a population where getting to a specialist in Dhaka from a rural district is a half-day trip with associated costs and lost work.
Telemedicine isn't a luxury here; it's a workaround for an access problem that isn't going to be solved by building more hospitals in the short term.
In education, 10 Minute School has built the most scaled edtech platform in Bangladesh by focusing relentlessly on mobile delivery and keeping content short. Shikho and a few others are doing a great job at scaling online learning. Interactive Cares, Hulkenstein, Apar's Classroom, and others serve the test preparation and skills market.
The fundamental tension in Bangladeshi edtech is that internet access is unevenly distributed; a student in Barishal or Rangpur faces a structurally different product experience than one in Dhaka, and the economics of serving rural students are harder. The sector is growing, but the digital divide is a real constraint on how fast.
In agritech, the numbers are still small, but the problem being addressed is not. Agriculture contributes about 11.66% of GDP and employs 45.3% of the workforce, yet the sector suffers from fragmented supply chains, information asymmetry, and limited access to finance and inputs.
A first generation of companies, Fashol and Agroshift (output market linkages), iFarmer (agri-fintech, over $3.5 million raised), Adorsho Pranisheba (IoT livestock monitoring), have raised a combined total of more than $14 million and are proving unit economics in small ways. The sector is nascent, but the TAM is large, and the incumbent alternative is genuinely bad.
The long-term question for any digital economy in a developing market is whether it remains a consumer of platforms built elsewhere or develops the capacity to build platforms and products that others use.
This is the value chain question, and Bangladesh's answer right now is mixed.
Bangladesh ranked second globally in online labor supply. The question is whether those workers are building products or services, and whether the distinction matters yet.
On the positive side, the BPO and ITES sectors have demonstrated that Bangladeshi talent can compete on quality at competitive price points in global markets.
The fact that software companies are exporting to 80 countries is not nothing. The freelancing sector's scale is real. And the ongoing US-China trade tensions are producing genuine interest in Bangladesh as an alternative manufacturing and services hub, a structural opportunity that wasn't available five years ago.
The startup ecosystem has scaled meaningfully.
The honest caveat is that most Bangladeshi companies are still competing on cost rather than capability.
This is not a criticism; it's a stage of development. India went through it. But the transition from cost-competitive to capability-competitive requires deeper digital literacy, better tertiary education in technical fields, and time. None of those things happens quickly.
Any serious analysis of Bangladesh's digital economy has to reckon with four constraints that aren't going away on their own.
The digital divide is structural, not cyclical. Rural internet penetration sits around 36.5% versus 71.4% in urban areas. Digital literacy in rural areas is estimated at roughly 28%.
These aren't gaps that improve automatically as more people get smartphones; they require active investment in education and infrastructure.
A digital economy that's concentrated in Dhaka and a few other cities is not yet a national economic transformation.
The payment system has a real hole in it. PayPal or Stripe doesn't operate in Bangladesh. For Bangladeshi freelancers and digital exporters, this means relying on Payoneer, wire transfers, or workarounds that carry higher transaction costs and compliance complexity. Research suggests 38.5% of freelancers identify payment risks as a significant concern.
When a neighboring competitor like India has access to PayPal, Stripe, Payoneer, and direct bank transfers, the friction differential is real and has compounding effects on which markets Bangladeshi freelancers can serve.
The regulatory environment is slow and sometimes counterproductive. A 15% VAT on digital services adds cost to every digital transaction. Absence of clear policies across the digital services landscape creates uncertainty for any company handling user data.
Bangladesh Bank's regulatory framework for MFS has been broadly enabling, but it favors the incumbents and doesn’t necessarily encourage competition and innovation.
The same cannot be said for every sector. Companies operating in fintech, edtech, and healthcare navigate overlapping and sometimes contradictory regulatory requirements.
Cybersecurity is an underappreciated risk. A 47% increase in cyberattacks between 2021 and 2023, particularly targeting financial services, is a serious warning sign. The Bangladesh Bank heist in 2016, which resulted in $81 million being stolen via the SWIFT network, is the most dramatic example, but the underlying vulnerability is systemic.
Limited institutional cyber defense capacity and low public awareness of digital security create risks that grow proportionally with the value of assets held digitally.
As MFS platforms absorb more of the population's savings and transactions, the stakes of a major breach increase accordingly.
The framing of building resilience vs. playing catch-up is useful, but it's probably a false binary. Most fast-growing digital economies do both simultaneously. They catch up on infrastructure and adoption while building pockets of genuine capability. Bangladesh is doing both.
The more useful question is: which constraints, if addressed, would most accelerate the compounding?
On this, the answer seems clearer. Solving the PayPal problem (or an equivalent cross-border payment solution) would have an immediate effect on freelancing and digital export earnings.
Passing and implementing workable digital services policies would unlock international investment in sectors that currently can't commit capital without regulatory clarity. Sustained investment in rural digital literacy, not just connectivity, would expand the addressable market for every digital product.
The fundamentals are genuinely strong. A country of 174 million people with a young population, deep mobile penetration, a functioning payments infrastructure, and demonstrated ability to export digital services at scale has real ingredients to work with.
The digital financial services trajectory alone, from bKash's founding in 2011 to unicorn status and 238 million accounts, represents one of the more remarkable financial inclusion stories in the developing world.
What's less certain is whether the institutional capacity exists to address the binding constraints at the pace the market window requires.
Digital transformation is accelerating globally. The window to establish structural advantages, as opposed to merely benefiting from global tailwinds, is real but not indefinite.
Countries that solve the payment, regulatory, and literacy problems faster will compound ahead of those that solve them later.
Bangladesh has the ingredients. The question, the one that's genuinely hard to answer from the outside, is whether the institutional machinery can move fast enough to use them.
