We back businesses that have already won their customers, and are ready to take them from ten to a hundred.
The category
A startup is zero to one. An SME is a size bracket a bank uses. Neither names what we back.
A ten-to-hundred company has already won the hardest thing there is to win: customers who come back. The owner is expert at the craft and holds real supplier and customer relationships. What the business does not have is the infrastructure large companies take for granted, the systems, resources, and capital support that turn one good year into ten. So it runs at a fraction of what its own demand could carry, and stops growing long before it runs out of customers.
Banks will not finance them. Venture capital does not find them interesting. Corporates think they are too small. What is left is friends, family, and whatever the business can retain, which is why so many owners reinvest every taka and build nothing of their own alongside it.
None of that is malice. A bank under permanent liquidity pressure has to lend against collateral, and these are the companies with the least of it. So the most reliable businesses in the country stay underbanked, and a great many stay unbanked outright. Not because they are risky. Because nobody has done the work to make them legible.
Policy has moved in the right direction: less capital held against small-enterprise loans, higher lending targets, dedicated cluster financing. Intent is not what is scarce. What is scarce is the operating work that turns a good business into one a lender can actually underwrite. That is where we sit.
Give an owner capital, distribution, and an operating system, and the ceiling moves quickly. A brand that sells out online can hold a lease and open a second store, then a fifth. The maker who has to turn away a peak-season order, because last season's stock still has the cash locked inside it, can finally say yes. Cash that used to sit in inventory comes back sooner and pays for the next opening.
And the jobs those openings create are the most durable thing any of us build here.
Numbers that arrive on time, every month, and can be trusted.
Store by store, product by product, with a name against each.
The number that decides how fast a business grows without new money.
Built in house. It lets a small team run like a large one.
We take an operating position, install those disciplines, and fund growth with capital structured to fit the cash flow. The model repeats across the portfolio. The current holding is the first proof.
The proof point is Shape, a lingerie retail chain operated alongside its founder: one store in 2025, five today, on track for ten.
Predictable, repeat demand in categories our own customers already ask for: women's services, consumer health, and everyday essentials. Run with the same discipline: a monthly close that closes, unit economics someone owns, and capital that fits the cash flow.
Now hiring
We hire for talent and train future CEOs, the people who will run our companies.
Real books, real deals, real decisions, alongside the people making them. Third year and beyond, or a few years into a first job. We judge on slope, not pedigree.
Each business is run day to day by a named operator. Luminthir owns the systems, the standards, and the capital discipline underneath them.
Luminthir is led by Ovick Alam. He built a company in Dhaka and sold it, so he knows first-hand what it is to run something good that no bank can read. He left to study at Wharton and to work in the United States, at Stripe and inside private-equity and venture-backed companies, learning how good operators actually run things. He came home to do that work here.
In Bangladesh, capital is allocated by connection, not by merit. Luminthir allocates it differently. The owners it works with are not short of talent or appetite for risk; they are short of the infrastructure that makes a good business fundable, and of partners who will carry risk beside them rather than price it from a distance. Nobody funds this work and nobody teaches it, so Luminthir funds it, and teaches it in house.
This is not a firm that admires the problem. It takes an operating position, does the work, and puts its own capital in.
Bangladeshi consumer brands in the Gulf.
Conversations are welcome from founders of consumer businesses with meaningful revenue, from operators who want to run something excellent, and from those who back them.