Pakistani VC Kalsoom Lakhani on the good, bad, and ugly of the recent funding boom.
In 2019, when Kalsoom Lakhani and Misbah Naqvi founded i2i Ventures, a $15 million Pakistan-focused venture capital (VC) fund, they hoped to sign about three deals a year. Now, they’re signing that many deals every quarter.
“I can barely keep up with the deal flow,” Lakhani told Rest of World. “My days are insane. My partner and I work anywhere between 10- and 14-hour days. I’m meeting about four to five new teams each week, in comparison to one or two a year back.”
Pakistan is in the midst of a massive boom in its tech startup sector: In 2021, Pakistani startups raised $365.87 million in VC funding, more than every previous year combined. By the end of the first quarter of 2022, the sector had received seven times as much funding as in the first quarter of 2021. The world’s fifth-most populous nation has also caught the fancy of some of the world’s largest VC investors: Tiger Global made its first investment in Pakistan in December and has since backed at least two more startups.
But Lakhani says these international investors are still not seeing Pakistan as a “strategic” investment destination but are, rather, simply “dipping their toes” into the country. In fact, the flood of funds has her worried. “There’s a lot of noise, and sometimes the valuations [that the startups are getting] are not priced right. What I would have laughed at a year ago is the norm now. I keep wondering, when did...
Read Full Story: https://restofworld.org/2022/pakistan-tech-investment-boom/
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.