Fahim Saleh: The tech CEO who started making millions at 16, building apps
In his Twitter bio he described himself as “an investor that finds things,” now his gruesome murder has left security operatives in New York with a herculean task – finding his killer.
Fahim Saleh, the co-founder and CEO of Nigeria’s first bike-hailing company, Gokada, was found dead by his sister in his $2.25 million apartment in Manhattan, New York in the United States on Tuesday. According to reports, his limbless and headless body was found on Tuesday afternoon and an electric saw was seen lying next to the remains.
While Police are battling to find his killer, NYPD told Neusroom via an email that no arrest has been made yet.
Saleh was not just an innovator, he was made in the mold of pioneers. Between 2003 and 2020, Saleh had founded and co-founded six companies and a tech incubator hub in Bangladesh.
The imprint of his innovations are in Africa, Asia and America. He started in 2003 at age 16 when he co-founded WizTeen as a High School student. The app, a network of websites targeted towards teenagers generated more than $1 million in revenue.
In 2009 when he graduated from Bentley University, Massachusetts, U.S, he founded TapFury, and created a prank calling app PrankDial, with over 20 million downloads. He moved to Bangladesh, his parents’ native country and founded a tech incubator – HachHouse in 2014, that was where he started Pathao in 2015, a motorcycle taxi company in Bangladesh valued at over $100m as of 2018.
KickBack Apps, an entertainment focused app company, was birthed in 2015 and in December 2017, he made an inroad into the largest market in Africa – Nigeria, by February 2018 the 33-year-old and former co-founder of Jobberman, Ayodeji Adewunmi launched Gokada to ease transportation in Lagos. Adventure Capital, which provides venture capital or funds to startups, is his youngest company. It was founded in 2018.
In a 2019 interview, he said Gokada was “born out of a need for quicker transportation systems and the high unemployment rates in Lagos, Gokada is working towards filling the gap for both its riders and customers.”
That dream was, however, sent to an early grave, by the number one killer of businesses in Nigeria – the regulators. The Lagos state government banned operations of motorcycles in major highways in the city, thousands of Nigerians employed by Gokada were affected. While other operators fizzled out after the ban, Gokada smartly pivoted into delivery service using its motorcycles.
The Bangladeshi-American integrated himself into the Nigerian society so quickly that he regularly moved round Lagos with Gokada bikes despite being the CEO of a company valued at over $100m. He also got into trouble with the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) in 2019 over work permit and had to tweet his way out of the impasse like every other Nigerian youth when they are arrested by the police.
In August 2019, he announced a temporary shut down of Gokada after he himself experienced a failure in the service when he requested for a ride from Victoria Island to beat traffic on Third Mainland Bridge.
Abraham Ojes, the co-founder of Zend Mobility (a delivery service company in Lagos) said just last week “Uzo and I were on a call with Saleh listening to an offer to absorb us into Gokada and a possible buyout.” With his gruesome murder on Tuesday, Abraham said that may not be happening again.
His gruesome murder, in the Manhattan apartment he acquired in December 2019 for $2.25 million, has thrown the global tech community into mourning.
