This Bangladeshi startup wants to be the Tencent of the country

A little-known Bangladeshi startup is aiming high: It wants to become the Tencent of the country. Its playbook? Building out a sprawling ecosystem of mobile apps and services through the millions of users it has already acquired.

Dhaka-based internet startup Data Bird is the company in question. It runs Bengali-language tool Ridmik Keyboard and online travel agency (OTA) ShareTrip. Both are companies it invested in two years ago and now fully owns.

Today, Ridmik Keyboard has 22 million monthly active users, while ShareTrip claims to have a leading share of the country’s online travel market, clocking in US$1.2 million in gross bookings in September. The two services form the bedrock of Data Bird’s growing family of apps.

“You probably haven’t heard of [us]… but we’ve intentionally done it that way,” Data Bird board member and investor Tanveer Ali tells Tech in Asia. Ali, who is the executive director of publicly listed consumer manufacturing firm Olympic Industries, was also an early investor in local ride-hailing app Pathao.

Data Bird operates several news and lifestyle apps. These include news aggregator app Ridmik News, Bengali e-book reader Boitoi, and Bondhu Buzz, a dating app that’s currently in beta. But the startup wants to do even more.

At the heart of its strategy is tapping into Ridmik Keyboard to push out other services. The platform, its first and flagship app, has averaged among the top 10 apps on the Google Play Store year to date, according to data from app intelligence firm Apptopia.

In typical super-app fashion, an upcoming Ridmik Messenger app will incorporate audio and video call functions, a digital content feed for friend updates and local news (similar to that of WeChat), and tie together all its various services. It will also eventually offer financial services such as peer-to-peer transfers and digital purchases.

Data Bird, which has raised US$5 million in seed funding to date, is seeking a US$10 million raise from regional and global venture capital funds in an ongoing series A round. The funds will primarily go toward building its messaging app. If all goes as planned, Ridmik Messenger will launch in the second quarter of 2021.

“Our objective is to expand into high-frequency-use fintech. We plan on launching a messenger app that’s very similar to the Tencent roadmap – with the integration of WeChat Pay, with high-frequency use cases, and with QR codes or peer-to-peer payments,” Ali explains.

A white-space opportunity

“Bangladesh is in that moment. I would say it’s China probably 20 years ago and India 10 years ago, and what makes that exciting is if you have a longer-term perspective,” says Siamac Kamalie, founder of investment management firm Skycatcher and a key seed investor in Data Bird.

Last year, the growth of the country’s yearly gross domestic product per capita outpaced that of China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. A burgeoning middle class as well as increasing smartphone ownership and internet connectivity are now setting the stage for a generation of Bangladeshis who are coming online for the first time. But 3G and 4G connectivity among the general population remains limited.

Capturing the travel market

Harnessing consumer data

Winning the market