Interactive Cares and the recurring crisis of trust in our startups

On April 28, immigration police detained Rare Al Samir, founder and CEO of the Dhaka-based edtech platform Interactive Cares, at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, as he attempted to leave the country. Both he and his wife were detained by the immigration police after a formal case was filed against them by several of the startup’s investors and former employees. Later, on May 13, a Dhaka court placed the duo on a three-day remand, following a second criminal case being filed on charges of fraud and criminal breach of trust.

Investors alleged embezzlement and money laundering, with the total owed reportedly exceeding Tk 10 crore. Current and former employees said salaries have gone unpaid for months. However, Samir denied the allegations and said everyone would be paid within a month or two. Six months ago, the same founder was the subject of a glowing profile in a prominent national daily, framed as a visionary bridging academia and industry, with 150,000 learners reportedly empowered and 130-plus corporate partnerships. In 2023, Interactive Cares was the only Bangladeshi startup selected for the Accelerating Asia cohort, raising some Tk 1.2 crore. The glowing profile and the recent detention are not in contradiction, but part of the same system running on schedule.

Allegations are not convictions, but the case has already damaged trust in Bangladesh’s startup ecosystem that no verdict can fully reverse it.

In September 2021, founders of e-commerce platform Evaly were arrested on charges of embezzlement, with the company’s liabilities to customers and merchants estimated at over Tk 500 crore. Around the same period, the owners of e-orange were jailed in a fraud case involving roughly Tk 1,100 crore. Dhamaka Shopping faced parallel allegations of laundering Tk 117 crore. These were not fringe operators, but household names advertised on cricket jerseys and celebrated in the same media that later struggled to explain how it had missed the warning signs.

Chaldal, the country’s pioneering online grocery, belongs to a different category, and it is important to say so clearly. Founded in 2013 and backed by Y Combinator, Chaldal is not accused of fraud. It is facing a liquidity crisis. Earlier this year, hundreds of Chaldal employees in Jashore Software Technology Park protested over three to four months of unpaid wages. Anticipated foreign investment did not materialise and support from the national startup fund did not come through. The workforce was cut from 3,300 to about 2,200. The company formally sought emergency bridge financing for a Tk 40 crore working capital shortfall. Founder Waseem Alim said the company had never missed a salary in its first 12 years.

That distinction matters legally and morally. It does not matter much to the employee who has not paid rent in three months, or to the investor whose capital is locked in a company that may or may not survive the year. From where they sit, the experience of fraud and that of stress feel similar.

In the startup ecosystem, trust moves in two directions that nobody talks about together. Investors fear founders who burn capital and disappear. Founders fear investors who exploit the moment a company stumbles. When a founder is vulnerable, the standard move is not to support them through it, but to take a larger stake for a smaller cheque. So founders learn to hide the cash crunch, project confidence, and keep the optics polished even when the substance is collapsing.

An ecosystem that makes it dangerous for founders to admit difficulty and tempting for investors to extract will keep producing collapses, whether the cause is criminal or structural.

Then there is the celebration machine that sits on top of all of it. At every layer, the incentive is to amplify the story of a startup and never to ask the harder questions: where are the audited financials? Are salaries actually being paid? Is the growth real or narrated? The earlier profile is not a journalistic failure in isolation. It is the natural output of a system in which everyone benefits from the rise and nobody is paid to look closely.

Evaly cracked the surface in 2021. Chaldal stressed it in early 2026. Interactive Cares is the line we just crossed. The cost is not measured in the Tk 10 crore that may or may not be recovered. The cost is in what happens next. A young entrepreneur in Khulna trying to raise a first round of funding next month will show up to investors who are now warier, more extractive, and more inclined to assume the worst. A genuine edtech founder building something honest will face learners who have decided that online courses are a scam. An investor who would have written a clean cheque may now write a punishing one, or none at all.

Real accountability in the startup ecosystem would mean investors agreeing to non-extractive bridge norms when founders surface problems early and accelerators publishing follow-on data on their portfolios, not just induction announcements. It would mean the media investing in due diligence before profiles, and in follow-up afterwards. It would mean founders building peer accountability structures so that nobody is alone with a cash crunch and a dwindling sense of options. It would mean having a regulatory environment that distinguishes between a founder who failed honestly and one who did not.

The alternative is a fragile system turning brittle, in public, again. The collapse of one startup is never about just itself or its founders. It has always been about whether we are willing to build something worth trusting. That question is still being asked.

Tafhimur Rahman is doctoral student at the University of Alabama in the US.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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