A medical referral & discovery platform for Bangladesh. Verified facilities, published prices, a metered ambulance, and a compliant way to make money in a market built on kickbacks.
স্বচ্ছতা, যাচাই, আর সঠিক দাম — এটাই আমাদের পণ্য।
Effectively the highest on earth — and rising, while every neighbour's is falling. There is no payer. There is no insurer. There is only the patient, paying cash, at the counter, with no idea what anything should cost.
World Bank / WHO Global Health Expenditure Database, 2023 (SH.XPD.OOPC.CH.ZS).
BIDS / Bangladesh National Health Accounts; World Bank/WHO 2023; Financial Express 2026.
Diagnostics is the #2 category of out-of-pocket health spending — bigger than seeing the doctor, bigger than getting there. It is also the single most manipulated line in the market.
Bangladesh National Health Accounts (BNHA) / BIDS, data year 2021, presented July 2024. Shares of out-of-pocket health expenditure.
Diagnostic centres pay doctors 20–50% commission to send patients their way. It is a documented, priced, industry-wide practice.
— Mustafa Jalal Mohiuddin, President of the Bangladesh Medical Association, on referral commissions. Even the profession concedes it.
New Age, 12 August 2022; The Business Standard. Commission rates as reported.
Not a different test. Not a better machine. The same test, in the same city, on the same day.
Tk 2,500 (govt) → Tk 25,000+ (private)
A 10× spread on a single procedure. Private facilities charge up to ~20× government rates on average, 32× at the extreme.
A cottage industry of "test price in Bangladesh" SEO sites already exists. Patients are actively searching for this and being served junk. That is the wedge.
| Test | Govt | Trust | Private | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lower abdomen ultrasound | Tk 110 | — | Tk 1,200–3,500 | 11–32× |
| Serum creatinine | Tk 60 | Tk 220 | Tk 500 | 8.3× |
| Lipid profile | Tk 300 | Tk 850 | Tk 1,650 | 5.5× |
| RBS | Tk 60 | Tk 170 | Tk 320 | 5.3× |
| ECG | Tk 80 | Tk 230 | Tk 400 | 5× |
| Brain MRI | Tk 3,000 | — | Tk 11,500 | 3.8× |
| Brain CT | Tk 2,000 | — | Tk 7,500 | 3.75× |
| CBC | Tk 150 | Tk 300 | Tk 400 | 2.7× |
New Age, 12 August 2022 (Dhaka). Prices are stale — the ratios are the story.
Only 914 of 19,627 hospitals & clinics (4.66%) and 1,790 of 35,597 diagnostic centres (~5%) have renewed their licence.
DGHS, via The Daily Star, 2025.
Of 134,568 registered physicians, roughly 1 in 4 practise without a renewed BMDC registration.
BMDC, Nov 2024; Prothom Alo, 2024.
Supply is also extremely fragmented: 44% sole proprietor, 40% partnership. Mom-and-pop supply is aggregatable supply.
999, the national emergency number, owns no ambulances. It phones private operators. Average time to service: 35–40 minutes, against a 15-minute clinical survival benchmark.
Hossain et al., IJCCEM, 2022. Utilisation 10.7%; user satisfaction 1.8 out of 4. That slack is the asset we monetise.
They control hospital gates and physically block outside ambulances from reaching patients. This is not a pricing dispute. People have died.
jagonews24; The Business Standard; Prothom Alo, 2025–26.
There is no meter. No rent chart. No monitoring authority. No national ambulance policy — a draft was submitted in 2016 and never acted on. Financial Express, 2021.
Checkout is a solved problem in Bangladesh. The bottleneck is trust and supply-side onboarding — not payments, not phones, not connectivity.
Most Bangladeshi health apps ship a bundle and hope one part pays for the rest. We are explicit about which pillar earns trust, which earns habit, and which earns money.
A published, distance-based fare anchored on the government's own Tk 35–40/km, in a market that has no meter at all. Live tracking. Vehicle and equipment disclosed before you book.
Not a revenue engine. Once-a-year emergency, poor retention. It buys the brand.
Side-by-side price comparison across DGHS-licensed centres only. 27.52% of out-of-pocket spend lives here. Repeat behaviour. This is the daily-use habit.
The doctor's "which test" decision stays structurally separate from the patient's "which lab" decision.
The only line whose ticket size can carry a commission and fund customer acquisition. Multi-destination: India, Thailand, Kunming, Malaysia.
And the only line where a commission is unambiguously legal for us to take.
More than the entire national health budget. Across an estimated 450,000–800,000 patient journeys a year.
Ahsan H Mansur, Governor of Bangladesh Bank (2025), with DCCI. Journey range reflects patients travelling on tourist visas.
After a two-year freeze. Automated time-slot booking across all five IVACs from 1 July 2026. The corridor is reopening right now. This deck has a shelf life.
BSS; Business Today; bdnews24, 2026.
India Ministry of Tourism / ORF; Bangladesh Monitor 2026; Prothom Alo; MHTC, 2026.
China opened a state-backed medical corridor to Kunming: first patients in March 2025, ~600 treated by August 2025, one-day "green channel" visas, halal food, roughly a quarter of Thailand's cost. The one thing standing between a Bangladeshi patient and that hospital is that they cannot speak to the doctor.
Concrete. Monetisable. Priced by the market already. It is a service we can sell on day one without touching a single regulated fee — and it is the one thing an Indian hospital corridor does not need and therefore has not built.
যাচাই করা বাংলা দোভাষী — বুকিংয়ের সঙ্গেই।
Prothom Alo; Dhaka Tribune, 2025. Note: liver transplant workup costs $1,000–2,000 in India vs $10,000–15,000 in Thailand (Al Jazeera, Jan 2025) — a 5–10× gap that explains why patients cannot simply switch destination when a visa closes.
BMDC Code of Professional Conduct, binding on every registered doctor under the BM&DC Act 2010:
Professional misconduct, not (yet) a crime. A Health Protection Act is being drafted and may criminalise it. Build so a statutory ban would not kill us.
| Player | Listing | Telemed | Lab | Ambulance | Tourism | Reality |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sasthya Seba | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | Our closest competitor. Ships our exact feature list — on a €5,000 grant. Unfunded, call-centre-driven, weak brand. |
| Shukhee (Grameen) | ● | ● | ● | ● | ○ | GP + Robi distribution. 2.8M installs, ~49K consults = 1.7% activation. Telco enrollments are not customers. |
| Arogga | ○ | ○ | ● | ○ | ○ | Most dangerous. $5.7M raised = 45% of all BD healthtech funding ever. Has the transaction, the repeat customer and the logistics. |
| Praava Health | ○ | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | Best funded ($10.6M, 2021). Owns clinics = heavy capex. Hunting a $15M Series B for ~5 years, still not closed. |
| Rhythm × Manipal | ○ | ● | ○ | ○ | ● | NEW · APR 2026 A BD–India tourism deal including pre-travel video consults with Indian specialists. That is our tourism module, shipped three months ago. |
| Doctorola | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ | ○ | ZOMBIE — founded 2015, $250K raised, 8 employees in 2026, zero press since 2016. |
Chains with their own booking apps (Square, Labaid, Evercare, Ibn Sina) have little incentive to pay us for walk-ins they would get anyway. The facilities that sign are the ones with idle capacity — mid-tier diagnostics, not Evercare Dhaka.
Bundle into a free telco tier, report millions of "members," discover none will pay. Tonic died of this. Shukhee is repeating it — 1.7% activation.
No transaction to monetise. Doctors won't pay for leads; patients won't pay booking fees alone. Doctorola: 11 years, 8 employees. Doctor listing is a feature, not a business.
Optimise for donor metrics, then die when the donor leaves.
Own the clinics, own the burn. Praava.
BD startup funding: $435M (2021) → $72M (2023) → ~$41M (2024), a six-year low. 2025's "$124M" is a mirage — $110M was one late-stage M&A.
Across 15 funded companies out of 252. Arogga alone is 45% of it. → We plan to reach profitability on revenue. We do not build a model that needs a Dhaka Series A.
Practo (SaaS to doctors) · Tata 1mg (product margin) · Apollo 24/7 (feeds an owned hospital) · Ping An Good Doctor (sells to insurers) · Halodoc (pharmacy + corporates). Not one of them monetises the booking. Referral is the acquisition layer — never the revenue layer.
URAL EMS (2018, "first app-based ambulance") is dead — Play Store 404s, domain does not resolve. SafeWheel pivoted away from ambulances. AmbuFast has ~2 App Store ratings. The field is weak, but nobody has proven these unit economics. We should be honest that we haven't either.
A marketplace with no supply is a search engine for disappointment. We do not launch to patients until the supply side is signed, verified and priced.
Mid-tier diagnostic centres and second-tier hospitals with idle capacity — not Evercare Dhaka, which has its own app and no reason to pay us. Ambulances that sit idle 89.3% of the time.
Facility uploads licence + renewal receipt. Number and expiry recorded, re-verified annually. Doctors checked against the BMDC register at onboarding, certificate on file. No licence, no listing.
One neighbourhood in Dhaka. A published fare, anchored on the government's Tk 35–40/km. Partner with hospitals for gate access — do not fight the syndicates for it.
The ambulance earns the brand once. Price-transparent diagnostics earns the weekly open. Then, and only then, medical tourism monetises it.
A slide that names its own unknowns is worth more than one that pretends there are none. Each of these is cheap to answer and expensive to get wrong. None of them can be answered by desk research — which is exactly why we have not answered them yet.
Milestone-based payments. Full source-code ownership transfers to the client. You can stop after any phase and still have a working, revenue-capable product.
Do not skip this. Written legal opinion + 20 supply-side validation calls. Cheap, fast, and it de-risks everything downstream.
Patient app · verified facility & doctor directory · diagnostics search with price comparison · ambulance booking with the meter · admin console. The trust wedge + the volume engine.
BMDC-compliant telemedicine & video (with the hard-coded drug matrix), patient records, checkup, analytics. In-country hosting throughout.
Medical tourism: multi-destination (India, Thailand, Kunming, Malaysia), international search, and the Kunming interpreter bundle.
A lawyer, on §4.3.2 and the DGHS platform licence. Twenty diagnostic centres, on whether they will pay. Five outbound agents, on what they really charge.
Approve Phase 0 and we start this week.
79.31% of the money is the patient's own. 27.52% of it goes to a test they didn't choose, at a price they can't see, in a facility nobody checked, reached by an ambulance with no meter.
Every one of those is a line of code and a signed supplier.
স্বচ্ছ দাম। যাচাই করা হাসপাতাল। সৎ ব্যবসা।
Every figure in this deck is sourced on the slide it appears on. Where no verified source exists — hospital willingness to pay, the Bangladeshi facilitator commission rate, agent malpractice — we have said so rather than filled the gap.
Mahfuz Akandমূল সাইটে ফিরুন↗