Bangladesh's startups raised about $435 million in their 2021 peak year and just $6 million in the first half of 2026. This is the story of that full cycle — bKash's unicorn rise, ShopUp's merger into SILQ, the funding winter that left even Chaldal unable to pay salaries, and the state's late, large attempt to build domestic venture capital.
Bangladesh has built ships for centuries — for sultans, merchants and the Mughal navy — and in 2008 became a modern ship-exporting nation. This is the story of its yards, from Khulna Shipyard and the state docks to Ananda and Western Marine: the export breakthrough, the debt crisis that nearly sank the sector, and the cautious revival under way in 2026.
Read MoreShahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), founded in Sylhet in 1986 as Bangladesh's first science and technology university, grew from 205 students in three departments to a research university of 8,900 students. From its 320-acre Kumargaon campus it pioneered the semester system, text-message admissions and the combined admission test — and still runs its own entrance examination.
Read MoreFounded in 1974 and headquartered at Segunbagicha in Dhaka, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy is the country's national academy of fine and performing arts — home to the National Theatre and National Art Gallery, organiser of the Asian Art Biennale, and, through branches in all 64 districts, the largest public patron of Bangladeshi culture.
Read MoreOn Bangladesh's southern coast, Kuakata is one of the few beaches in the world where the sun both rises and sets over the same sea. Behind its 18 kilometres of sand stands an older story — Rakhine settlers who crossed from Arakan in 1784, dug the wells that named the place, and built its Buddhist temples — and a modern one, of tourism growth on a shoreline being steadily cut away by erosion.
Read MoreSajek Valley, a ridge-top settlement of Lushai, Pangkhua, Tripura and Chakma villages in Rangamati's Baghaichhari upazila, rose from one of Bangladesh's most inaccessible corners to its most famous hill destination in a single decade. This profile traces the valley's land, river and people, its tourism boom, the devastating fire of February 2025, and its closure in the autumn of 2026.
Read MoreOn the night of 18 April 1930, a schoolteacher and some sixty-five young revolutionaries seized Chittagong's armouries, cut the city off from British India and proclaimed a provisional government — but the ammunition was never found. This is the story of Surya Sen, the Battle of Jalalabad Hill, and the women of the movement, Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Datta.
Read MoreIn October 1764, on the Ganges at Buxar, Company sepoys under Hector Munro defeated the combined forces of Mir Qasim, Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. That victory — judged by Britannica to be more decisive than Plassey — led to the Treaty of Allahabad and the Diwani grant of 1765, turning a trading company into the revenue ruler of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
Read MoreFerdousi Priyabhashini (1947–2018) was a self-taught Bangladeshi sculptor who made art from driftwood, roots and discarded natural material — and the first woman to publicly announce herself as a Birangona, breaking decades of silence about the women assaulted during the Liberation War. She received the Independence Award in 2010 and was gazetted a freedom fighter in 2016.
Read MoreSyed Shamsul Haque was the "sabyasachi" — the ambidextrous writer — of Bengali literature, a master of poetry, the novel, the verse play, translation and the film script alike. From the Liberation War drama Payer Awaj Pawa Jay to the scandalous Khelaram Khele Ja, his six-decade career carried him from a wartime BBC microphone to the Bangla Academy Award, Ekushey Padak and Independence Award.
Read MoreAl Mahmud (1936–2019), born Mir Abdus Shukur Al Mahmud in Brahmanbaria, was the poet of Sonali Kabin — a Language Movement schoolboy who became an editor, a prisoner, an academy director, and the most debated Bengali poet of his generation. This profile follows the whole arc, from the 1952 leaflet that brought him an arrest warrant to the posthumous Independence Award of 2025.
Read MoreShah Abdul Karim (1916–2009) was a poor farmer's son from Ujan Dhol village in Sunamganj who became the Baul Samrat — the Baul King — of Bengal. With his ektara and more than 1,500 songs, including the communal-harmony anthem "Age Ki Sundor Din Kataitam", he carried the mystic philosophy of the haor wetlands to the whole of Bangladesh, receiving the Ekushey Padak in 2001.
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