Shahir Chowdhury

About Shahir Chowdhury

Shahir Chowdhury is the Founder and CEO of Shikho, a digital learning platform built to expand access to quality education across Bangladesh. As The Business Standard has reported, the company has drawn international capital to fund that mission. He came to education technology after a lengthy career in a very different industry.

Sixteen Years in London Finance

Chowdhury grew up in Dhaka before moving to the United Kingdom in 2005 to study Business Management at Cardiff University, graduating in 2009. He spent the following sixteen years in UK financial services, starting his career at Barclays in London across roles in Financial Planning and Strategy, Treasury Advisory, and Investment Management.

He later moved to HSBC, where he served as a Director in the bank's UK Private Bank division, and earned the Chartered Financial Analyst designation from the CFA Institute in October 2014. That combination of retail banking, treasury, and private wealth experience gave him a very different professional grounding than most Bangladeshi edtech founders.

Returning to Build Shikho

In 2019, Chowdhury co-founded Shikho alongside Zeeshan Zakaria, choosing to leave a well-established UK finance career to build an education company in Bangladesh. The company set out to build what Chowdhury has described as a hyper-localized digital learning ecosystem, aimed at a learning-age population of roughly 85 million people.

That framing, treating education access as a problem of scale rather than a niche tutoring product, shaped Shikho's approach to content and pricing from the start.

Raising International Capital

Under Chowdhury's leadership, Shikho has raised $8 million in funding from investors including Sturgeon Capital, SAJIDA Foundation, and Goodwater Capital. That international backing gave the company runway to build out its content library and platform infrastructure well beyond what a bootstrapped Bangladeshi edtech company would typically have access to.

In 2022, Shikho was featured on the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, recognition that came roughly three years after the company's founding.

Recognition for Equitable Education

In 2023, Chowdhury was selected as a Bloomberg Catalyst for his work promoting equitable access to education in Bangladesh. That recognition placed him among a small group of global entrepreneurs recognized specifically for work at the intersection of technology and education access, rather than pure business growth metrics.

Chowdhury continues to lead Shikho's expansion, applying the operational discipline of a sixteen-year finance career to scaling an education platform across one of the world's largest learning-age populations.