For years, the default advice given to ambitious founders in Dhaka was to look east or west. Incorporate in Singapore, chase a Southeast Asian accelerator, pitch to funds hunting the region's next breakout company. That playbook is losing its shine, and the money is moving somewhere else.
In 2025, startups across the Middle East and North Africa raised US$ 7.5bn, up 225 per cent year on year, according to media reports. Saudi Arabia drove much of that growth on its own, recording US$ 1.72bn in venture funding, a rise of 145 per cent, while deal volume climbed 45 per cent to 257 transactions. For the first time, the kingdom overtook the UAE in deal activity, accounting for 37 per cent of all MENA transactions. Southeast Asia's venture boom, by contrast, has cooled considerably over the same period.
Bangladeshi companies are already showing up in the numbers. The clearest example is SILQ Group, the entity formed when Bangladesh's ShopUp merged with Saudi Arabia's Sary in a deal worth more than US$ 100m, according to LightCastle Partners, whose 2025 Startup Investment Report tracks the country's funding activity. Pathao, the ride hailing and logistics company, raised a US$ 12m pre-series B round led by VentureSouq, a Gulf-based fund. Markopolo, a business software startup, took US$ 2.0m from Joa Capital, a Saudi venture firm. Edtech player 10 Minute School raised US$ 2.0m led by Conjunction Capital in the UAE, while transport platform Jatri secured backing from Fatima Gobi Ventures, an investor with reach across Pakistan and the GCC.
None of this looks like a coincidence. LightCastle's year in review found that Gulf based investors accounted for roughly a third of all global funding into Bangladeshi startups in 2025, a meaningful diversification away from the traditional pool of Western and Southeast Asian capital. Local investors, meanwhile, contributed less than US$ 1.0m across just three deals for the entire year, underlining how dependent the ecosystem remains on money from outside the country.
Bangladesh recorded US$ 124m in total startup funding across 12 deals in 2025, up sharply from US$ 42m in 2024, but LightCastle's report is clear that the jump was driven almost entirely by the single SILQ transaction. Financial services took 89 per cent of all funding for the year. Strip that one deal out and the early stage market looks much as it did before: cautious, thin, and short of the follow-on rounds that let companies scale past their first cheque.
Media commentary on the region argues that founders who still measure the ecosystem's health against the old Singapore route are working from the wrong map entirely. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 diversification programme is actively courting international startups, and the capital, urgency and early cross-border deals are already there for founders willing to build relationships in the region rather than waiting for them to arrive.
Gulf investors bring their own expectations around governance, monetisation and regional relevance, and a US$ 2.0m or US$ 12m round is still a small fraction of what founders need to reach the Series B stage that continues to elude most Bangladeshi companies. But for a market where local capital remains scarce and Western funds have grown more selective, a corridor to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi is no longer a curiosity. It is starting to look like the most realistic route to growth capital that Bangladeshi founders currently have.
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