Oraan raises $3M to increase financial inclusion among Pakistani women - TechCrunch

After working as an investment banker in Canada for a decade, Halima Iqbal moved back to Pakistan in 2017 and quickly realized how difficult it is for women to access financial services. “I had a really hard time opening up a basic bank account. It took me about three and a half months,” Iqbal told TechCrunch. She began researching how Pakistani women deal with money—for example, how do they save or take out credit?
Then she met product designer and entrepreneur Farwah Tapal, who had recently returned to Pakistan from Spain, and the two created Oraan in 2018 to help women access financial services. The startup announced today it has raised $3 million in funding, co-led by returning investor Zayn Capital and Wavemaker Partners, with participation from Resolution Ventures, i2i Ventures, Hustle Fund, Haitou Global, Plug and Play and angels like Claire Diaz-Ortiz, a former investing partner at Magma Partners and early Twitter employee.
Oraan has now raised just over $4 million in funding. Iqbal and Tapal said they are the first women entrepreneurs in Pakistan’s fintech space to raise a seed round.
“There was an opportunity, how can we understand the saving space and informal economy in Pakistan, and where can we capture that?” Iqbal said.
Oraan decided to start with ROSCAs (rotating credit and savings associations), or committees of people who contribute money to a pool that is distributed to a member each month. It will expand into more financial services, with plans to...

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