Shahadat Khan

About Shahadat Khan

Dr. Shahadat Khan is the Founder and CEO of Progoti Systems Limited, the company behind TallyKhata, a digital bookkeeping and payments platform built for Bangladesh's small shopkeepers. As The Daily Star has reported, millions of small business owners now use the app to record transactions and manage payments.

Two Decades Before Founding a Company

Khan built more than 23 years of experience across university teaching, research and development, software engineering, product marketing, and technology consulting before founding Progoti Systems. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Victoria in Canada, earned as a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar.

Before returning to build a company in Bangladesh, he served as CTO at Eyeball Networks in Canada, work that gave him deep technical grounding in networked communications systems.

Building Mobile Financial Infrastructure First

Rather than starting with TallyKhata, Khan's Progoti Systems first built SureCash, a mobile financial services network that connected multiple banks, mobile operators, NGOs, merchants, and government payment partners onto a single infrastructure layer. That groundwork in interoperable mobile banking rails came years before TallyKhata existed as a product.

That earlier infrastructure work meant Khan wasn't starting from zero when he later built a consumer-facing product on top of it.

Launching TallyKhata

Progoti Systems launched TallyKhata in late 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated demand for digital tools among small shopkeepers who could no longer rely purely on paper ledgers and in-person transactions. The platform combined a digital bookkeeping ledger with TallyPay, a digital wallet, letting merchants track sales and accept payments in one place.

The timing proved significant. TallyKhata grew into one of the fastest-growing MSME platforms in the country, reaching more than 5.5 million registered businesses and processing over a million transactions daily.

Building Toward Digital Credit

Under Khan's leadership, TallyKhata has continued evolving beyond bookkeeping and payments into working-capital lending for the small merchants using the platform. That shift reflects a broader strategy of using transaction data collected through TallyPay to underwrite credit for businesses that traditional banks have historically found difficult to serve.

Progoti Systems has also secured Payment Service Provider licensing from Bangladesh Bank, and TallyPay achieved PCI-DSS certification, milestones that position the platform to keep expanding its role in Bangladesh's small business financial infrastructure.