Two years ago, a group of entrepreneurs in Pakistan began surveying the market to understand why financial services weren’t reaching the majority of merchants in the world’s fifth most populous nation.
On Friday, Tiger Global said it is backing their startup, CreditBook, to help address those challenges. This is the New York-headquartered firm’s first investment in Pakistan.
A number of other investors, including Firstminute Capital, Banana Capital, VentureSouq, Ratio Ventures and i2i Ventures, as well as angel investors Sriram Krishnan and Julian Shapiro also participated in the $11 million pre-Series A round. This is also Firstminute Capital’s first investment in the South Asian market.
“We started the research and began experimentations in late 2019,” said Iman Jamall, co-founder of CreditBook, in an interview with TechCrunch. “I was working as a service designer on a project for one of the largest Pakistani banks at the time and was observing different persona types to understand why financial inclusion is low at the level that it was at the time.”
The challenges that Jamall, one of the few female founders in the country, identified were cash flow, the role of credit and the social relationships around it, and the over reliance on “paper for everything essentially,” she said.
The over reliance on paper to maintain ledger and the always-running low cash flow is a challenge that merchants in many markets in South Asia and Southeast Asia share. As we previously covered,...
Read Full Story: https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/16/tiger-global-backs-fintech-creditbook-in-first-pakistan-investment/
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