Ataur Rahim Chowdhury

About Ataur Rahim Chowdhury

Ataur Rahim Chowdhury is the Co-Founder and CEO of ShopUp in Bangladesh, a platform built to bring small, offline retail shops into the digital economy. He came to the company as an engineer, not a retail specialist, a background that shaped how ShopUp's technology was built from the start.

An Engineer Before a Founder

Chowdhury studied Computer Science and Engineering at East West University, graduating in 2012, and worked as an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant there while completing his degree. He then worked as a Programmer at iTechnoLab before spending several years as a Full Stack Developer at Ice9 Interactive, from January 2012 to December 2015.

In early 2016, he consulted as a Software Engineer for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, work that took his engineering skills into a very different, mission-driven context before he returned to building consumer technology.

Co-Founding ShopUp

In 2017, Chowdhury co-founded ShopUp in Dhaka alongside Afeef Zaman, who serves as CEO of the wider ShopUp group. The company set out to solve a problem specific to Bangladesh's retail landscape: hundreds of thousands of small shops were already selling through Facebook pages, but had no organized way to manage inventory, orders, or logistics behind that storefront.

ShopUp built conversational commerce bots and backend tools that plugged directly into sellers' existing social media pages, rather than asking shop owners to migrate to an entirely new platform.

Building the Technology Behind Small Shops

As Co-Founder and CTO in ShopUp's early years, Chowdhury was responsible for the technical architecture that let the platform automate logistics and manage seller inventory and orders at scale. That infrastructure now underpins a network collectively reaching more than 31 million people through the small businesses it serves.

The technical challenge wasn't building commerce software in the abstract. It was building it to work inside the messy, informal way Bangladeshi retail already operated on social media.

From CTO to CEO

When ShopUp merged with Sary, a Saudi Arabia-based B2B commerce company, to form SILQ Group, Chowdhury took on the role of CEO for ShopUp's Bangladesh operations. That shift moved him from a purely technical leadership role into running the country business end to end, at a point when the merged entity was operating across multiple markets.

Mentoring the Next Generation

Beyond his operating role, Chowdhury has been vocal about mentoring the next generation of product leaders coming up in Bangladesh's tech industry. Having built ShopUp's technology from the ground up himself, he has positioned much of his post-merger focus around developing the product and engineering talent that will carry the platform forward.