Udhaar Book, a Karachi-based startup, has received $6 million in seed funding to digitize mom-and-pop stores that previously ran their operations through manual entries.
According to Bloomberg, the investors that participated in the early funding include Fatima Gobi Ventures, Plaid Co-founder William Hockey’s Muir Capital, Tinder Co-founder Justin Mateen’s JAM Fund LLC, Integra Partners, and Commerce Ventures LLC.
Udhaar’s co-founder, Fahad Kamr told Bloomberg,”Pakistan is mostly a cash-based economy but startups are looking to change that. The nation is home to as many as 30 million micro-, small- and medium enterprises that operate manually and deal in cash. Many small business owners such as grocery shops are not able to expand since they need to keep an eye on drawer holding all the cash.”
“We’ve barely scratched the surface so obviously expanding the reach of the product is super important at this time,” Kamr added.
“That’s where a lot of the funding will also go,” he added.
Udhaar Book currently has 1.4 million users and reports that more than half are active users. Users can access its services through a mobile application available on both Android and iOS.
The company promises 100 percent secure, accurate, and free methods of keeping a record of business transactions via its services, and the application can be used to send customers reminders of unpaid dues.
It also provides automatically generated transaction reports and works both online and offline to ensure consistent functionality with automatic data backups to keep data safe and secure.
Pakistan has received record seed funding of more than $300 million in the ongoing year as venture capital and private equity investors gear up investing in the region.
