Comment by Riaz Haq on April 19, 2022 at 7:24am

“It’s like drinking from a firehose”: Inside Pakistan’s tech investment boom
Pakistani VC Kalsoom Lakhani on the good, bad, and ugly of the recent funding boom.

https://restofworld.org/2022/pakistan-tech-investment-boom/

What kinds of investment opportunities are available for these investors?
Like a lot of early emerging markets, most companies, especially the ones that are venture backable and raising funding, are coming up in the B2B or B2C e-commerce, fintech, and logistics. With a growing consumer class and digital adoption, these three sectors grow, often in relation to one another. I’m also seeing a lot of ideas that have a sibling version in another market — something might be the “Khatabook for Pakistan” or the “Stripe for Pakistan.” Founders still have to localize and innovate the model for the local realities, and a lot of international investors like pattern matching. While they may not know Pakistan well, they can understand the model because they’ve seen it work before.

Why are we seeing this sudden spurt in investment in Pakistan?
Before 2021, Pakistani tax residents were not allowed to set up holding companies outside of the country. So, if an investor wanted to invest in a startup operating in Pakistan, they had to invest in an entity within the country. That was a very big risk, as many foreign investors felt they didn’t know how to invest in Pakistan, and the process felt very opaque. In 2021, the State Bank of Pakistan changed that legislation, which meant that international investors could easily back an entity in Singapore or Dubai or Delaware [which operates in Pakistan]. At the same time, the pandemic forced a lot of international investors to get comfortable with investing without having been to a country. The idea of remote diligence became a thing.

Then, there was a lot of liquidity, and people were looking for avenues to invest, and if you wanted to put your money in places that are still relatively untapped, Pakistan is one of those markets. It’s the fifth-largest market in the world, and the addressable market is getting significantly larger with the consumer middle class growing.

Finally, the sophistication of founders in Pakistan has also improved pretty significantly. A lot of that has to do with Uber’s acquisition of Careem. Many people who worked at Careem started their own companies, and they already have a network to reach out to. There’s a massive network of ex-Careem people that are angel investors now. These young people have had significant experience working in a high-intensity, operationally heavy business and the exposure that others before them did not have. I’ve invested in two ex-Careem companies and [am] potentially investing in a third, hopefully, today.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 19, 2022 at 4:44pm

Pakistan’s Fintech SadaPay Raises Funds Ahead of Mass Rollout
SadaPay is country’s most-funded fintech after $10.7 mln round
U.S. entrepreneur moved to Pakistan to start venture

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-19/pakistan-s-finte...

Pakistan’s SadaPay raised additional funds to become the nation’s highest-funded fintech as it received permission for full-fledged operations that will allow it to add millions of new users.

The Islamabad-based startup scored $10.7 million in a seed-extension round, according to Chief Executive Officer Brandon Timinsky. The funding announcement comes a day after the central bank allowed it to offer financial services through its smartphone app.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 28, 2022 at 7:06am

#Pakistani #Startup Oware Raises $3.3 Million To Address Pakistan’s $35 Billion #Logistics Market. #US investors include Flexport Fund, Ratio Ventures, Seedstars International Ventures, Osiris Group, Swiss Founders Fund, Reflect Ventures, others.
@forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidprosser/2022/04/28/oware-raises-3...

"To get to its end destination, a product has to move between several warehouses, fulfilment centres and trucks,” adds Nisar. “This complex ballet is managed by multiple businesses without interconnected systems. Our vision is to build a large scale connected world of distribution that enables a faster route to market for our customers.”



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Fixing Pakistan’s outdated logistics infrastructure will help the country's businesses grow and expand the economy, says start-up Oware, which is today announcing a $3.3 million seed financing round. The company, founded last June, promises to help businesses increase sales through more flexible warehousing and smarter distribution.

Oware founders Raza Kazmi and Adil Nisar argue that businesses across Pakistan are being held back by antiquated logistics systems. They struggle to secure new warehousing capacity to store inventory, the founders say, find it difficult to monitor their inventories, and face complex distribution problems.

“Our solution to that problem is based on a shared infrastructure that enables businesses to build sales without substantially increasing their costs,” explains Nisar. “The aim is to level the playing field for Pakistani businesses, because it’s currently only the large multinationals that have access to modern systems.”

In that context, Oware’s solutions are essentially three-fold. First, the business has opened 15 warehouses across four cities offering 500,000 square foot of space to rent; businesses can simply sign up to lease the space they need in any of these facilities, rather than having to find warehousing for themselves.

In addition, Oware offers a distribution service, moving businesses' goods from the warehouse to customers such as retailers and fulfilment centres, in line with their orders. This business-to-business distribution is crucial in a country were competition for last-mile delivery to the consumer has improved performance in recent times, but where previous stages of distribution have been ignored.

The final piece in the jigsaw is modernised logistics technology. Oware is building out dashboards that connect to all the moving parts of supply and distribution so that customers have far greater visibility of their stock levels and operations. The technology can also help reduce costs – for example, by analysing the trade-off between warehousing costs and delivery prices to identify where best to store inventory.

"Local businesses remain trapped in an archaic and opaque environment dealing with antiquated supply chain systems that are no longer fit for purpose and remain slow, limited, and capital intensive," says Kazmi. "The time to set up operations is too long, there is limited visibility or tracking of orders, and the execution of processes is inefficient in terms of speed and cost, which we are on a mission to solve".

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 29, 2022 at 4:28pm

Pakistan women fight gender norms to build online health business
by Zofeen T. Ebrahim |

https://news.trust.org/item/20220427154524-2hs38

Growing number of Pakistani women jump into health tech

Women founders face multiple barriers in conservative Pakistan

Mental health care not considered legitimate

Pakistan, April 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - After surviving a car crash that left her hospital-bound and unable to walk for months, Saira Siddique embarked on a mission: making health care accessible to Pakistanis.

The 45-year-old left her high-profile job in government health to pitch her app linking doctors and patients by video to investors.

Months later, with COVID-19 hurting businesses across Pakistan, Siddique's firm, MedIQ, burst on to the scene as the country's first "virtual hospital".

"(The pandemic) really gave a boost to my company," said Siddique.

With face-to-face doctors' appointments restricted due to contagion risks, Siddique's company, connecting patients across Pakistan with doctors and pharmacies, was suddenly in demand.

MedIQ served 16,000 patients in its first six months. Almost two years on, the number has increased by nearly 20 times.

Siddique is one of a growing number of women in Pakistan who are defying conservative gender norms by jumping into the health tech industry.


"Running a startup business is like riding a bull," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from the capital Islamabad.

"You never know which way or how hard it's going to buck."

Siddique's company raised $1.8 million in an early stage of financing last week after receiving mentoring in the World Bank-backed WeRaise programme, which helps women-led ventures in Pakistan raise capital.

'DOCTOR BRIDES'
Others are blazing a similar path.

Two entrepreneurs in Karachi wanted to use the untapped potential of tens of thousands of so-called "doctor brides" - women doctors who quit their medical practise after marriage in a country where millions have no access to medical care.

Iffat Zafar Aga and Sara Saeed Khurram's platform allows female medics to provide e-consultations from their homes to patients in mostly rural communities.

In the country of some 210 million the doctor-patient ratio stands at just a little over one for every 1,000 patients, according to the World Bank.

Countries such as the United States, Japan and Brazil have more than two doctors for every 1,000 patients, while Britain has nearly four.

The pair has set up dozens of 'e-health clinics' in low-income communities where, for as little as 80 rupees ($0.43), a patient visits a nurse who uses the online platform to reach a doctor.

Khurram said they provided free consultations during COVID-19 after the government sought their help - a task made possible by their team of 7,000 doctors, many of whom are former doctor brides.

The phenomenon of doctor brides remains pervasive with many families encouraging their daughters to study medicine not for a career, but to bolster marriage prospects.

More than 70% of the country's doctors are women, but only half will ever practise, according to the Pakistan Medical Commission.

'LATE-NIGHT DEALS'
From domestic violence to anxiety over job losses and grief of losing family members to Covid-19, requests for virtual appointments on ReliveNow, an online mental health care platform, surged during lockdowns.

Amna Asif, its founder and CEO, said most of the clients were women, including single mothers, struggling to juggle children while working from home.

"This put us on the radar, and helped increase our sales," said Asif by phone.

Founded in 2018, ReliveNow has clients - 80% of whom are women - in dozens of countries including Pakistan, Britain, Canada and Australia.

But the road to success for firms like MediIQ and Sehat Kahani has been paved with misogyny, stereotypes and discouragement.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 30, 2022 at 10:35am

there has been a robust growth of IT and IT-enabled (ITeS) remittances in the past five years. According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan (2020-2021), the compound annual growth rate for IT and related services reached 18.85 per cent, the highest growth rate of any industry in the region. In addition, micro enterprises, independent consultants and freelancers contributed around $500 million to IT and ITeS exports while the annual domestic revenue exceeded $1 billion.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1686067

According to the survey, from July to February of the outgoing fiscal year, IT export remittances in sectors including telecommunication and computer IT services surged to $1.29bn at a growth rate of 41.39pc, compared to $918m during the corresponding period in FY20. Enabling government policies have contributed to this remarkable growth. These include numerous sustainable development and accelerated digitisation projects, incentives to bolster growth, including 100pc equity ownership and specialised foreign currency (FCY) accounts for IT/ITeS firms and freelancers to fulfil operational demands, thus addressing a long-standing concern of IT companies regarding the easy inflow/outflow of foreign currency.

Now IT/ITeS companies and freelancers can keep 100pc of remittances received through proper banking channels in their FCY accounts without being forced to convert them to rupees. Moreover, outward transfers from FCY accounts are also unrestricted for Pakistan Software Export Board-registered IT companies and freelancers.

However, the revelation that the IT sector carries tremendous potential is not new, though the industry remains unexploited. Google recognised Pakistan as far back as 2018 for rapidly turning into a “digital-first country”. At present, Pakistan has the fourth-largest growing freelancers’ market globally. The country is known for software development, business process outsourcing (BPO) and freelancing of IT-related services.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 2, 2022 at 11:09am

Pakistan’s IT exports reach $1.94 billion within the first 9 months of the financial year 2021-22 (FY22)
However, due to political unrest, the country may not reach its desired target of $3.5 billion through IT exports.

https://pk.mashable.com/tech/15787/pakistans-it-exports-reach-194-b...


Pakistan’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) exports have skyrocketed in the current fiscal year (2021-22). The IT export value continues to close down the $2 billion mark in FY22.

According to the latest data released by the State Bank of Pakistan, the industry maintained a solid rise of inflows, which totaled $1.94 billion from July to March in the current financial year 2021-22, representing a 29.2 percent year-on-year gain.

Since the Covid-19 outbreak, Pakistani enterprises and freelancers have been capturing the increased global demand for tech-related services as a result of remote working and e-learning arrangements. During that time, exports of ICT services increased in practically all areas, including software consulting, call centers, and telecom services.

The net exports connected to the IT industry exclusively, excluding additional services like call centers, were $1.47 billion in the first nine months of this fiscal year, accounting for 75.56 percent of the overall $1.94 billion in ICT exports.

In comparison to FY21, net IT-only exports increased in the current fiscal year. Last year, net exports were $1.12 billion, accounting for 74.72 percent of the $1.50 billion in export proceeds.

With a quarter remaining in the fiscal year 2021-22, IT exports are likely to reach more than $2.5 billion by the conclusion of the current fiscal year. Due to political problems in the country, Pakistan may not be able to reach the desired target of $3.5 billion which was set by the previous government.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 7, 2022 at 7:34am

Pakistani startups raise over $200 Million
Sadapay raised a $10.7M seed round just after receiving their EMI license. Meanwhile, Abhi Pvt. raises a $17M Series A round.

https://www.globalvillagespace.com/pakistani-startups-raise-over-20...


Pakistani startups have raised over $200 million in funds with the recent Sadapay funding round of $10.7 million. According to the stats by Chief Executive Officer Brandon Timinsky, the Islamabad-based startup has become the nation’s highest-funded fintech.

The funding announcement comes a day after the central bank allowed it to offer financial services through its smartphone app.

Pakistan is seeing a rush of investors eager to back startups in the world’s fifth-largest nation, one of the last large untapped markets. A flurry of fintech’s is emerging in Pakistan, which has the world’s third-largest unbanked population, according to the World Bank.

Earlier, Pakistani financial platform Abhi Pvt. raised $17 million in a Series A round led by venture capital firm Speedinvest. The Karachi-based salary advance platform has raised funds at a $90million valuation within a year after introducing its business.

“All sizes of companies and their employees want the services we provide. The proceeds will support our exponential growth, and help us meet customer demand,” Omair Ansari, CEO at Abhi, said in a statement.

Reportedly, another startup Dastgyr is close to raising a $45 million Series A round as it gears up for expansion. The country’s startups raised a record over $350 million in 2021. From 2015 to 2022 YTD, Pakistani startups have raised a total of $728 million across 272 deals.

Timinsky, an American entrepreneur, came to Asia to explore new opportunities after a previous startup was acquired in the U.S. Last year, the fintech started operating in pilot mode, which restricted users to 10,000, before it got the Electronic Money Institution license from the State Bank of Pakistan on Monday.

The opportunity lay in “a huge population of young people with smartphones, high cellular-broadband penetration, sleepy incumbent banks, and massive policy reform by the government to support digitization,” Timinsky said when he first visited Pakistan.

Unlike conventional banks, Sadapay allows customers three free cash withdrawals in a month, offers round-the-clock in-app chat support, and opens an account in two minutes.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 11, 2022 at 11:13am

#PayPal Ventures leads $50M Series B for #Egyptian #fintech Paymob. The #MiddleEast #technology #startup has seen 4x monthly volume growth, and it is expected the company’s expansion into #Pakistan will yield even better results. https://tcrn.ch/3vYq2dm via @techcrunch

Monday, May 9, is upon us, and today is a day of browser-cache-powered drama in the form of a Wordle word The New York Times decided was too controversial, but still existed for people who hadn’t refreshed their browser in a while. Find out what the word was, and why there was dramaaaaaaa, in Amanda’s piece. Incidentally, DRAMA would be a great Wordle word, so there’s that. – Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3
An offer they couldn’t refuse: It looks like Egyptian fintech Paymob snagged one of the largest funding deals in the region — a $50 million Series B, with PayPal Ventures and Kora Capital leading — based on its ability to turn cash-loving customers into digital users with its cards and wallets. That subsequently led to 4x monthly volume growth, and it is expected the company’s expansion into Pakistan will yield even better results.
Wall Street’s downward spiral continues, but not everyone is feeling it: The stock market was still showing red as we wrote this, so it might be good to hold off on checking your investments for a bit. However, not all is bad in the world of stock performance, and Alex and Ron took a look at four tech companies that actually did OK last week, despite the choppy markets.
Hacking your Tesla’s radio: If you are looking to get CarPlay into your Tesla, look no further than one of TechCrunch’s resident tinkerers Matt, who decided to give it a try on his Ford F-150 to show how easy it could be.

Startups and VC
If you’re a startup founder, money – specifically, your own wages – can be a sticky point. You need permission from your board to give yourself a wage bump, but how do you know whether you’re under- or over-paying yourself? We got a hold of a 250-company dataset that sheds some light on that question.

Over on TC+, Alex described the current stock market spiral as “joker detection,” which we are all for. Meanwhile, Connie talked with Sequoia’s Jess Lee to get a deeper understanding of how VC companies think about their deals.


Feed your brain with these tasty morsels:

Hug it out with linguistically progressive robots: We’re fans of startups with great names, and the now-valued-at-$2-billion Hugging Face may very well be up there as one of the best. The company is building the “GitHub of machine learning” and just raised $100 million to continue down that path.
Workin’ 9 to 5 (Indonesia edition): Atma, an Indonesian startup that wants to make job hunting less painful, raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by AC Ventures.
Workin’ 9 to 5 (Middle East and Africa edition): For the Middle Eastern and North African market, Manara raised $3 million to grow the region’s tech talent pool.
So clever you can barely beleaf it: When machines take a closer look at plants, some fun things start to happen. Brightseed’s Forager is a machine-learning platform that identifies and categorizes plant compounds. It has already mapped 2 million, considerably more than is characterized in scientific literature. And it raised $68 million to get deeper into the science.
I fought the law and … well, the jury is still out, actually: Swedish startup PocketLaw — a contract automation software-as-a-service legal tech platform that is mainly focused on SMEs — has pocketed $11 million in Series A funding to fuel expansion in Europe.
Virtually unstoppable home improvements: South Korean startup Bucketplace, which operates a home decorating and interior app OHouse, is looking to continue capitalizing on the DIY trend, raising $182 million to add some AR to the mix.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2022 at 7:10am

#Pakistan #Tech: MEDZnMORE Online #Pharmacy #Startup Raises $11.5M in Pre-Series A Funding Round led by Integra Partners, Nunc Gestion, Sturgeon Capital, and Alta Semper. #healthcare #medicine https://propakistani.pk/2022/05/12/medznmore-raises-11-5m-in-pre-se...


MEDZnMORE, a Pakistani health-tech platform on a mission to reshape healthcare for over 220M people, has raised the largest investment of any healthcare startup in Pakistan.

The startup has raised $11.5 mn in Pre-Series A funding from Integra Partners, Nunc Gestion, Sturgeon Capital, and Alta Semper. Other Investors include AlTouq Group, ACE & Company, Key Family Partners, Reflect Ventures, Atlas Asset Management, and a few angel investors who are closely aligned with MEDZnMORE’s mission to transform healthcare in Pakistan.

The company had previously raised $2.6 mn in September 2020 which was the country’s largest seed round at the time.

The company, founded in late 2020 by Asad Khan, Saad Khawar, and Babar Lakhani, is a B2X pharma delivery platform that aims to solve problems that have persisted for decades in buying medicines and wellness products for consumers and retail pharmacies alike.

In a market riddled with counterfeit medicines, where over 40% of all dispensed medicines are either spurious or have lost efficacy; MEDZnMORE is looking to solve this epidemic of counterfeits by improving the availability of, and ease of access to, authentic medicines all across Pakistan.

MEDZnMORE partners with pharmaceutical companies and/or their authorized distributors across Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, where it operates its warehouses, to deliver genuine products, and the best-in-class experience, to patients and retail pharmacies.

The company has seen phenomenal traction and has been growing ~42% month over month for the past 12 months and now controls over 1% of the Pakistani pharma market and delivers over 100,000 products from its 7 cold-chain enabled warehouses located across Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad every day.

Asad Khan, CEO MEDZnMORE, shared, “In a market of over 220m people, where public healthcare spending is only 1.2% of the GDP, and where 55% of all healthcare spending is out-of-pocket, people generally rely on medicines to alleviate their suffering, rather than spend on prohibitively expensive medical procedures.”

“Ensuring the accessibility of affordable and authentic medicines is essential. At MEDZnMORE our aim is to make health and wellness products available in all corners of the country,” he added.

Talking about the matter, Saad Khawar, Co-Founder MEDZnMORE said, “Constantly having to play catch-up with ever-increasing consumer demand has kept us humble and on our toes, and our journey has only just begun.”

He added, “We’re spending most of our energies on building scalable technology that can handle the complexities that come with a cold chain enabled Pharma supply chain and, getting together a world-class team that is passionate about reshaping healthcare in this country.”

“MEDZnMORE is solving some of the most pressing problems within the Pakistani healthcare space and has shown phenomenal traction in a very short span of time,” said Jinesh Patel, Managing Partner, Integra Partners.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 16, 2022 at 7:32am

How #Tech #Startup Markaz Raised $2.4 Million Seed Funding to Build A New Marketplace For #Pakistan’s Micro-Enterprises. Pakistan's retail market is worth $170 billion a year, but only 2-3% of that is online. #DigitalTransformation #Technology https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidprosser/2022/05/16/how-markaz-bui...

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the four founders of Pakistani start-up Markaz Technologies, noticed something going on around them. Like people all around the world, their friends and families were buying more products online than ever before; but crucially, they were purchasing from micro-enterprises via social media channels such as Facebook and Whatsapp, rather than the large ecommerce platforms.

The idea for Markaz, an online reselling platform that has just completed a $2.4m seed funding round, came from that experience, says Shoaib Khan, one of those founders. “My a-ha moment was when my mother told me she had bought some sheets through the Whatsapp account of a woman she had known for more than 10 years,” he recalls. Shoppers such as Khan’s mother were embracing ecommerce, but trust remained a huge issue; they wanted to buy from people they knew – or at least not from large and faceless corporations.

Khan and his co-founders, Fawad Hussain, Sameel Hayat and Umair Aslam, all of whom had worked in technology businesses in Pakistan and internationally, began looking into this phenomenon. They discovered a growing community of entrepreneurial traders who were buying goods from wholesalers and then reselling them to consumers via social media. These were small-scale businesses – often women looking to make extra money to support families, or to pay their way through education – but they had spotted a big opportunity.

Pakistan's retail market is worth $170 billion a year, but only 2-3% of that is online, Markaz points out. And while the rapid penetration of smartphones promises to drive that figure up rapidly, consumers are cautious. "People in Pakistan don't buy from shops, they buy from shopkeepers," says Khan. When moving online, they want to maintain that human interaction, he argues

Against that backdrop, Markaz is the founders’ solution to many of the problems that these resellers face as they seek to exploit the opportunity and grow their businesses. Often, sourcing high-quality products is difficult, with suppliers operating in different ways and visibility lacking. Cashflow can also be a problem, with resellers having to pay for inventory upfront even if they’re not selling it immediately. Logistics issues, including delivering to customers, make for additional headaches.

Markaz bypasses these difficulties by providing a platform on which multiple suppliers and resellers can connect. Resellers check out what is available, offer the goods for sale to their own customers, and then place their orders as and when they need to. Markaz takes care of the delivery, shipping the goods straight from the supplier to the reseller’s customer, and also manages payments.

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