Biman flight BG371 takes about a hundred minutes from Dhaka to Kathmandu. Before the reporter had cleared Tribhuvan airport’s free Wi-Fi, a notification arrived from an app installed for Dhaka traffic: Pathao was available here. A tap, a few minutes, and a driver named Sanjay Sanju pulled into the airport car park. The Bangladeshi ride-hailing company has operated in Nepal since 2018, and on the ground it looks less like an experiment than a fixture.
What it does there
Pathao’s motorbikes and taxis are a common sight on Kathmandu’s roads, and the service runs out to the hill town of Nagarkot, 26 kilometres away. Bikes and cars are joined by food delivery and a parcel service within the city. Sanjay, who has driven for a few months, earns 1,000 to 1,500 Nepali rupees a day, much of it from tourists he collects at the airport. Purna Lama, a driver from Kavre near Nagarkot with several years on the app, says foreign visitors use ride-hailing apps by habit, and increasingly use Pathao not just for one trip but to tour the region. For locals the app is one of several — InDrive, Zoomzoom and Sajilo compete — and Pathao, they say, holds its own.
Why it works for tourists
Hiring a taxi at a Nepali airport or trekking town is a negotiation, and foreigners lose it. An app with a fixed fare, a map and a driver rating removes the argument, which is why visitors — many of them Bangladeshi and Indian — reach for it first. Nepal’s tourism economy, in other words, runs part of its daily transport on a Dhaka company’s software.
What the founders and the government take from it
Fahim Ahmed, Pathao’s managing director and CEO, told Prothom Alo that Nepal is “a source of pride and proof of what the Bangladesh startup ecosystem can do” — the company set out to solve local problems and always intended to cross borders. Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, the chief adviser’s special assistant on ICT, said seeing a Bangladeshi startup’s logo in another country is encouraging, and offered advice to the next ones: adapt to the local culture, become relevant to that society, keep management transparent, and hire better people as you grow. It is not complicated advice. It is just rarely followed by the companies that fail abroad.
