From campus code to national, international impact: The journey of Sumit Saha

In Bangladesh's tech scene, it's uncommon to meet someone who is equally comfortable leading a fast-growing company and teaching beginners in a way that makes hard topics feel simple. Most people pick one lane. Sumit Saha somehow built credibility in both.

I spoke with Sumit to understand the person behind two major movements that many people in the country recognize today: Analyzen, widely known as the nation's early digital-first agency that later grew into one of the larger independent players, and "Learn with Sumit," the grassroots education platform that has become a go-to starting point for hundreds of thousands of aspiring developers. What I found was not just a founder's success story, but a steady pattern: building original solutions, taking risks early, and staying consistent long enough for those risks to turn into standards.

Sumit was born in Dhaka, and his education took him through Rangpur Zilla School, Notre Dame College in Dhaka, and then the Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET), where he studied Computer Science and Engineering. BUET, he says, widened his world: peers who loved the same puzzles, and an internet that was becoming a library.

By his third year, he was already doing real client work as a freelancer. Deadlines and feedback showed him the “workspace and potential” of tech beyond campus.

To understand Sumit's standing today, you have to go back to August 2008, when he was a student at the Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET). While many classmates were focused on exams and routine campus life, Sumit and his classmate Ridwan Hafiz were doing something else - turning their dorm room into a working headquarters. That is where they started Analyzen.

Sumit laughs when he thinks back to the early days. "We tried some bold - sometimes slightly ridiculous - ideas on a new platform," he says. "Mostly for fun. We were also, in our own way, casually promoting our digital tech products and services."

Yet what looked playful on the surface was part of a serious shift in how his team approached marketing. At a time when many corporate brands still treated social media as a passing trend, Sumit and his team were already testing interactive, technology-led campaigns built around measurable, transparent outcomes.

They ran early viral selfie contests, experimented with online video commercials, and designed interactive campaigns that some initially dismissed as gimmicks. In hindsight, many of those "gimmicks" were simply ahead of their time - tech-first initiatives where the marketing came later. Today, much of what they were doing back then has become standard practice for digital agencies.

Sumit was often called "The Rainmaker" in the team - not only because he could write code, but because he could imagine a new way for brands to communicate with consumers and then build the technology to make it real.

Over the years, Analyzen grew from that dorm-room operation into a multinational company. They expanded beyond Bangladesh into Singapore and Myanmar, and by 2023, into Canada - and according to Sumit, they did it without foreign investment, relying instead on the team's own execution and a culture he likes to describe as "superhero-like," where people are expected to take ownership and solve hard problems.

As we walked through the milestones of his career, one thing became clear: Sumit isn't someone who simply joined an industry and followed a playbook. He has tried, repeatedly, to reshape what the playbook looks like. Analyzen's work has been recognized through 150+ national and international awards, which Sumit sees less as "decoration" and more as proof that the work held up over time - not just once, but consistently.

One achievement he still mentions with pride is Analyzen receiving the Silver award for "Digital Agency of the Year (Rest of South Asia)" from Campaign Asia-Pacific in 2017. For a Dhaka-based agency to be recognized on that regional stage was, in his words, a moment that made the team feel "seen" beyond their home market.

But Sumit was even more animated when he talked about recognition tied directly to product engineering. He brought up the 2019 BASIS National ICT Awards, a night he remembers clearly. According to him, Analyzen won the Champion trophy in three separate categories in a single year - something he calls a record in the local tech industry - and the winning projects were not "campaign gimmicks," but real software systems backing the marketing communication to solve practical problems.

They won for microzen, a next-generation microcredit management and digital lending platform that he describes as the first-ever decision support system in the microfinance industry. They also won for listenyzen, an AI-powered social media customer support and "social listening" tool that helps brands track consumer sentiment and respond across platforms - built single-handedly by Sumit himself. And they won for commzen, an AI-powered conversational commerce bot that Sumit and his team developed that can recognize product images and chat with customers to drive sales on Facebook and other social channels. "It was the first time one company had won three Champion awards in a single night, and I was honestly stunned standing on the stage with all three in my hands," Sumit noted.

The significance of that night wasn't only the trophies. It was what those trophies represented: original software contributions at the intersection of finance, marketing automation, and commerce. Sumit believes that kind of engineering-first work is what helped qualify Analyzen to represent Bangladesh at the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) 2019 in Vietnam, an event often described as the "Oscars of ICT."

If Analyzen is Sumit's brain, "Learn with Sumit" is the project people mention when they talk about his public impact.

During the lockdowns of 2020, while most executives were scrambling to save their bottom lines, Sumit quietly began recording videos in his home studio. He had noticed a glaring gap in the market: while there were plenty of coding tutorials online, almost none explained the "nitty-gritty" fundamentals in clear, Bangla - the way people actually speak.

"I didn't want the next generation to struggle the way I did," he explained.

The response was bigger than he expected. What began as a YouTube channel grew into a full learning ecosystem. Today, his channel has 175,000+ subscribers, and the dedicated Facebook community built around it has grown to nearly 98,000 members.

But Sumit didn't stop at making videos. True to his developer roots, he built a proprietary Learning Management System (LMS) from scratch - learnwithsumit.com. This platform allows students from rural villages to take structured courses, track their progress, and earn certificates, all for free. It is a massive undertaking that has essentially democratized tech education in Bangladesh. I've seen the comments on his videos - stories of young men and women from non-engineering backgrounds landing jobs at top software firms solely because "Sumit Bhaiya" taught them how to code.

The most interesting part of my conversation with Sumit was learning how intentionally he has started moving from national influence to a broader, global presence.

Through his new initiative, logicBase Labs, and a high-profile collaboration with freeCodeCamp - one of the world's largest developer communities, known for reaching 15 million+ developers - Sumit has begun teaching a global audience as well.

In 2025, Sumit began contributing original technical "handbook" articles, including deep-dives on multi-threading in Node.js with worker threads and on the Model Context Protocol for connecting code, data, and tools to AI applications. He also mentioned that his recent masterclass on Git & GitHub was watched by 100,000+ learners worldwide in less than a month.

At one point in our conversation, he brought up something that clearly mattered to him personally: Quincy Larson, freeCodeCamp's founder - widely respected in the developer community - featured some of Sumit's handbooks in his weekly email newsletter, which reaches 2 million+ readers worldwide.

"To be listed as a Bangladeshi educator alongside instructors from Silicon Valley... that feels good," Sumit admitted.

Even after becoming widely recognized as an educator, Sumit has continued building products at the intersection of finance, marketing, and commerce. In late 2025, he said his original software contributions continued to draw attention; his own project microzen earned an Honorable Mention at the Bangladesh FinTech Award.

With that recognition has come a different kind of responsibility. He is frequently invited to judge hackathons and tech competitions, helping evaluate the work of upcoming developers. He also speaks at international conferences like WordCamp and mentors at high-level events, including a recent data science masterclass with the London School of Economics.

His community-facing work also shows up in open-source contributions, developer tools, and organizing events like devCon 1.0 in 2023, a week-long developer conference that he describes as one of the most celebrated and talked-about gatherings in the local ecosystem. He also mentioned one small example of "tool-building" turning into public value is a VS Code theme he developed that became the highest-rated code editor theme globally in Microsoft Marketplace, with 1,50,000+ installs. Thousands of developers use this theme as their de facto theme without realizing that it was developed by a Bangladeshi.

As our interview wrapped up, I asked Sumit what keeps him moving. At this point, he runs a multinational company, teaches a large learning community, writes for global platforms, builds award-recognized software, and is repeatedly invited to judge and speak.

"It's about showing that you don't have to leave Bangladesh to conquer the world," he said.

That line stayed with me. Sumit Saha's story is not only about ambition - it's about persistence, original thinking, and the discipline to keep building long after the first success. From a BUET dorm room to national impact and a growing global footprint, he has made a strong case for what a homegrown tech leader can become when he refuses to settle for average.