Six promising young Bangladeshi entrepreneurs have been selected to present their innovative work at the ninth Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) to be held at the Hague next month.
They are Hydroquo, Lifespring, SOLshare, Lal Teer Seed Ltd, Intelligent Machine Ltd and Footsteps Bangladesh.
They highlighted their work during a meeting with the press on Wednesday organised by the embassies of the Netherlands and the USA in Dhaka.
The United States and the Netherlands are co-host of the GES to be held from June 3 to 5 and the entrepreneurial summit will centre on innovative and promising ideas and projects from 1,200 specially selected ‘next generation entrepreneurs’ and aims to advance global entrepreneurship.
Lifespring
Founded three years back, LifeSpring is now a $10 million company employing over 200 professionals. It wants to be the nation’s leading community-based mental health institute dedicated to promote mental health as a pivotal of overall wellness.
Bangladesh Police, Bangladesh Air Force, Unilever, Roche, Telenor, IDLC, BRAC bank, BUET, BSMMU, NSU and other big names are the clients of Lifespring. It is working to become a $100 million company in next seven years and $1 billion company in 25 years.
Hydroquo
The journey of the company began eight months ago and since then it received numerous recognition from Glasgow and Oxford universities, Apple, Nato and FFactor UK.
It is currently working with Dhaka Wasa to automate the monitoring of water pipelines in an effort to create Bangladesh’s first ever live water data architecture.
It’s founder Zahin Razeen said, “GES is for entrepreneurs what Oscars are to actors. This is an immense opportunity to showcase Bangladesh’s potential to be integrated in the vast landscape of artificial intelligence developments and perhaps one day become a place for international collaborators.”
Footsteps Bangladesh
It is a social enterprise founded in 2013 and based in Bangladesh dedicated towards improving livelihoods by integrating social technology and building knowledge capacity in targeted communities to overcome various social challenges. It launched Project Trishna in 2015 to develop safe water system and so far it ensured safe water access for over 10,000 beneficiaries.
Shah Rafayat Chowdhury is the co-founder and president and Footsteps and he has been recognized by the European Commission as one of the 16 Global Young Leader in 2018.
Lal Teer Seed
It is the largest producer of seeds in the private sector in Bangladesh. It used to be an importer, but now it exports about $1 million worth of seed. It has 1,500 dealers and 18,000 contract growers who plant crops for seed extraction.
The company needs investment to fight salinisation and it will try to attract investment at the GES by demonstrating its specially engineered seeds that allow crops to grow in saline areas.
According to its director Tajwar Muhammed Awal, Lal Teer’s saline resilient seed programme has dramatically increased yield and income of farmers.
Intelligent Machine Ltd
It is an artificial intelligence and advanced analytics service organization which has started with a goal to provide powerful business applications to local communities by highly capable persons who largely migrate abroad to join tech companies. The company got a five-year contract from bKash and their merchandising field force now make trade marketing calls at 300,000 outlets with an application developed by the company.
SOLshare
It is a social company that offers ICT-enabled products and services contributing to Goal 7 of the Sustainability Development Goals. SOLshare was declared as one of the most innovative startups by World Economic Forum.
SOLshare has created a revolutionary new approach to bring affordable solar electricity to everyone in Bangladesh and beyond through its peer-to-peer solar energy trading platforms based on distributed ledger technology. It pioneers a micro-energy transition model 3.0 by interconnecting solar home systems in peer-to-peer networks, monetizing excess solar energy along the value chain in real time with mobile money and empowering communities to earn a direct income from the sun.