Maliha M Quadir

About Maliha M Quadir

Maliha M Quadir is the Founder and CEO of Shohoz, a Bangladeshi super app that grew from an online ticketing service into a platform spanning ridesharing, deliveries, and travel bookings. As The Daily Star has reported, she has been recognized as one of the top female founders globally for the scale of capital she raised for the company.

An International Finance Career First

Quadir was born and raised in Dhaka before studying in the United States, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Economics from Smith College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Her early career took her into investment banking, working on the Utilities Mergers and Acquisitions team at Morgan Stanley in New York and San Francisco, and later in Debt Capital Markets at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore.

She also worked at Nokia, where she handled strategy and business development for Nokia Life Tools, an emerging-market digital content service, and later ran Vistaprint's digital business across emerging markets from Singapore.

Coming Back to Build Shohoz

Quadir began working on Shohoz in mid-2013, and by December of that year had raised a small angel round from her network of Harvard contacts. She moved back to Bangladesh and started building the company in earnest in January 2014, soft-launching it later that year.

That international finance and strategy background gave her a very different starting point than most Bangladeshi founders tackling the country's chaotic ticketing industry at the time.

Digitizing an Unstructured Market

Shohoz launched around a straightforward but underserved need: buying tickets for buses, launches, and movies online rather than through informal agents and long queues. The company spent its first three years focused purely on ticketing, building a brand that became widely recognized for online transactions in a category that had previously run almost entirely offline.

In March 2018, Shohoz expanded into ride-hailing in Dhaka, transforming the company from a ticketing service into a broader mobility and logistics platform.

Growing Into a Super App

Under Quadir's leadership, Shohoz grew from an initial team of 30 employees into a company employing more than 350 people, now offering ridesharing, delivery, and travel and event ticketing under a single platform. That growth attracted some of the largest funding rounds among Bangladeshi startups at the time.

International Recognition

In 2017, the World Economic Forum named Quadir one of its 100 Young Global Leaders. In 2019, she won the Best Woman Entrepreneur Award at the third Digital Bangladesh Day, presented by the ICT Ministry and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, alongside The Daily Star's Best ICT Startup of the Year Award for Shohoz.

Quadir continues to lead Shohoz today, having built one of the most recognized consumer technology brands in Bangladesh from a small angel-funded idea a decade earlier.