Behind the scenes of Pathao’s growth to a 600-strong team in 3 years

This article is from an episode on Asia VC Cast, a podcast hosted by Daniel Song. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full interview, go here.

Hussain Elius is the CEO and co-founder of Pathao, a Bangladesh-based company providing on-demand ride-sharing, logistics, and food delivery services.

He started Pathao to address the notorious traffic condition in very dense Dhaka. With only five bikes then in 2015, Elius’ friends would call him for delivery services that were manually scheduled on an Excel sheet.

Today, Pathao is considered a pioneer in the Bangladeshi startup scene, growing from a lean team of five people to over 600 and supporting 200,000 registered drivers as of 2019.

In this interview, Elius shares some of the challenges and lessons from scaling the company.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and Pathao.

I was born and bred in Bangladesh. I started three to four companies before Pathao, but none of them survived for very long. Only Pathao, which I established about three years ago, was able to scale.

Right now, the company is very similar to Gojek, but our services are used mostly in Bangladesh. We have about 5 million downloads and do more than 100,000 transactions every day.

What kind of opportunity did you identify in Bangladesh?

Bangladesh has around 180 million people – it’s the eighth largest country in the world by population, so there’s a lot of opportunities. And Dhaka is one of the densest cities in the world right now with over 20 million people.

Unfortunately, as a developing country, it still lacks some very basic infrastructure. The bus system isn’t that great and there’s no proper metro rail system.

However, in the last few years since 2013 or 2014, there has been a enormous surge in cheap smartphones with 3G and then 4G technology. We have seen a lot of people coming online for the first time with their mobile phones.

So, with that, we thought that bikes are the best way to travel in this market: they’re fast, efficient, and much cheaper than most other transportation options.