Bangladesh-focused VC makes debut investment

Anchorless has provided about $600,000 in seed funding to Loop Freight, which aims to digitize the operations of truck fleet owners navigating a fragmented and unsophisticated domestic logistics environment. The VC firm described the company as a perfect fit for its mandate, which targets early-stage companies taking advantage of the local consumer sector's rapid pace of change.  

Anchorless was set up last year by Rahat Ahmed, a serial entrepreneur based in Dhaka. He previously covered Bangladesh for US-based frontier markets-focused Prince Street Capital where he led an investment in the Dhaka Stock Exchange. His investment experience also includes seeding Pathao, a local ride-sharing and logistics start-up that has gone on to raise about $35 million from the likes of Openspace Ventures and Go-Jek.

Ahmed's team features three other partners, including Dan McMurtrie, a co-founder and portfolio manager at Tyro Partners, a US asset manager serving high net worth individuals, and Lauren Wenning, who previously served as a partner at Prince Street. They are joined by Peter Findley who has experience in hedge fund and quantitative investing with the likes of BlackRock and Deutsche Bank.

The Loop investment was framed as an opportunity to organize a massive, decentralized market lacking in transparency. "Bangladesh has the eighth largest population in the world: 165 million people living in an area the size of Iowa with an economy that's been growing almost 10% a year nominally for the last decade," Ahmed said in a statement. "This growing consumer demand in a high-density market creates an industry worth over $10 billion a year in truck freight alone."

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• Topics
• South Asia
• GPs
• Early-stage
• Support services
• Bangladesh
• Logistics
• TMT