Ollyo

About Ollyo

Ollyo is a Dhaka-based software company that builds and maintains products for the WordPress and Joomla ecosystems, reaching a combined install base in the millions. It started in 2010 not as Ollyo but as JoomShaper, a company founded by Kawshar Ahmed to build templates and extensions for Joomla at a time when most Bangladeshi developers were already moving toward WordPress instead.

That early decision to build products of its own, rather than take on client contracts the way most software companies in the country did at the time, has stayed the core of how Ollyo operates ever since.

Betting on Joomla First

Kawshar Ahmed came to software from an unusual direction. He studied at Bangladesh Textile University, not a computer science program, and picked up most of his web development skill on his own starting around 2008.

Two years later he founded JoomShaper, choosing to build for Joomla rather than the more popular WordPress, a decision that put the company in a smaller, less crowded market where a dedicated team could build real depth. Over the following years JoomShaper released more than 120 premium Joomla templates and over 30 extensions, building a loyal base of customers in a niche that larger competitors had mostly stopped paying attention to. That focus gave the company a foothold in the Joomla extension market that it has held onto even as the wider industry moved elsewhere.

Expanding Into WordPress

As WordPress's share of the global CMS market kept growing, the company followed its customers there rather than staying locked into a single platform. Early WordPress releases included SP Page Builder and the Helix theme framework, both aimed at the same kind of small business and agency customers JoomShaper had already built a relationship with on Joomla. Tutor LMS, one of the company's flagship products today, came next, giving training centers, schools, and independent course creators a way to run a complete e-learning platform without stitching together separate plugins for quizzes, question banks, and student dashboards.

The company also built a freeform visual website builder for WordPress, originally launched under the name Droip and later renamed Kirki after the original name kept getting autocorrected to "Drop" in searches and typing, a small naming problem that was quietly costing the product visibility.

Bringing the Products Under One Roof

By January 2021, the company had grown into a collection of separate brands, JoomShaper, Themeum, and IcoFont among them, each with its own product line, support team, and customer base. Kawshar Ahmed restructured the group under a single parent company, Ollyo, giving the individual teams shared infrastructure and leadership while letting each brand keep its own name and identity in the market it had already built.

The consolidation also gave the company room to launch newer products under that shared structure, including Growfund, a fundraising plugin built for nonprofits, educators, and community organizers running donation and reward-based campaigns directly from their own WordPress sites instead of routing through a third-party platform and its fees.

Where Ollyo Stands Today

Across its full product line, Ollyo's plugins and themes have been downloaded more than 15 million times, a figure that spans everything from Joomla-era templates to its newest WordPress tools. The company runs out of its own office campus in Dhaka with a team of roughly 70 people covering engineering, design, writing, marketing, technical support, and sales.

Kawshar Ahmed still leads the company hands-on, staying close to product decisions rather than stepping fully into an executive-only role, a habit that has shaped how closely Ollyo's teams work with the customers actually using their tools day to day. That combination, a founder still building alongside his teams and a product lineup that spans two different CMS ecosystems, is part of what sets Ollyo apart from most of the software companies working out of Dhaka today.

Products

Ollyo's product portfolio spans both the WordPress and Joomla ecosystems it has built for since 2010.

Tutor LMS is a WordPress learning management plugin used to build, sell, and manage online courses, with more than 100,000 active installations and a 4.9 out of 5 rating from users.

Kirki is a freeform visual website builder for WordPress that works on an open, infinite canvas rather than the grid-and-column layout most page builders force on users.

Growfund brings donation and reward-based fundraising into a single WordPress plugin, built for nonprofits, creators, and community organizers who want to run campaigns without routing through a third-party platform.

JoomShaper, the company's original product line, continues to serve the Joomla community with page builders, templates, and extensions.

Together, these four product lines give Ollyo one of the more diversified footprints among Bangladeshi WordPress and Joomla companies, spanning e-learning, no-code page building, fundraising, and the Joomla ecosystem it started with back in 2010, all built and supported by one team working out of Dhaka.