Q2 2022 Dealflow Roundup

Jul 15, 2022

Hey there! Welcome to the first issue of the i2i Insights newsletter. I’m Shifra and this is the i2i Insights' roundup for Q2 2022, spotlighting dealflow activities in the Pakistani startup ecosystem.

Before going into the Q2 roundup, we need to address the biggest news of Q3 so far: Airlift, Pakistan’s most-funded startup, is shutting down. There’s a lot of discourse around Airlift, but I just want to reiterate what Kalsoom, GP of i2i ventures, has already tweeted:

I’m also worried that this will reflect poorly on Pakistan’s entire startup ecosystem, which is unfair to the MANY startups building well right now, growing without compromising their biz fundamentals. Failure in any startup ecosystem isn’t anomaly; it’s inevitable. The more we leave room for failure, the more we also create room for successes in their wake.

Q2 Roundup:

Amount raised in Q2: $102.7M across 15 deals
Amount raised YTD: $274.7M across 37 deals
Top deals (by amount raised): Dastygr’s $37M Series A, Abhi’s $17M Series A, and MedznMore’s $11.5M Pre-Series A.
Top Sectors: E-Commerce ($40.4M across 3 deals), Fintech ($27.7M across 2 deals), and Healthtech ($13.4M across 2 deals). Note: We categorize Bykea as a Super-App — they raised a $10M Series B.
All Deals: To view the details of all the deals that took place in Q2, check out the i2i Dealflow Tracker. It’s free and we’ve kept it open-source for years :)

Insights:

Q2 was a lot slower compared to Q1, standing at an almost 40% decrease from last quarter ($172M vs $102.7M). However, YTD 2022, Pakistani startups have raised almost 80% of what was raised in total in 2021 ($350M in 2021 and $275M in 2022 so far).

Dastygr’s $37M Series A accounted for a little over 30% of the total funding raised in Q2.

Almost 65% of the total funding this quarter went to network-cluster (NC) startups. Network cluster is a novel term we use at i2i to track founders who previously worked at a prominent startup (eg. Careem, Swvl, etc) before founding their own companies.

This quarter, the following startups were classified as Network Cluster (NC) startups:

Bykea — Ex-Daraz
Dastgyr — Ex-Careem, Ex-Airlift
MedznMore — Ex-Careem, Ex-Zameen, Ex-Dawaai
Markaz — Ex-EasyPaisa
Oware — Ex-Careem, Ex-Daraz
Zaraye — Ex-Careem, Ex-Swvl, Ex-Dawaai

Interested in what Kalsoom had to say? View her Twitter 🧵here:

Kalsoom Lakhani @kalsoom82

It’s July 1st, so time for @Invest2Innovate’s Q2 2022 Pakistan 🇵🇰 startup funding roundup (put together by our Insights team, s/o to @ShifraKhan!). In Q2, startups raised $102.7M bringing our YTD to $274.7M, not bad considering in 2021 we did ~ $350M but here are a few thoughts:

Catch you next time! 👋🏽

— Shifra

Did we miss something? Questions/comments/feedback? Email me.