Adeel Abid is a cofounder of Linkstar, the platform that gave freelancers a free portfolio website and sold them paid upgrades, and, according to a 2023 report, the chief business officer of Oliv, the Dubai graduate recruitment marketplace that he and his two partners bought. In May 2024 Forbes named all three founders to its 30 Under 30 Asia list for consumer technology.
Of the three friends who built Linkstar, Abid has the least conventional route into a Pakistani startup. According to Sarmayacar, the venture fund that backed the company in 2022, he had been working in the United Kingdom at Banco Santander before he started a business with two people he had known since childhood.
His story matters for two reasons. It is a clear case of Pakistani founders building for the country's freelancers, a large and underserved market, and then buying their way into the Gulf. It is also a case study in how quickly the record of a young company can thin out. By October 2026 Linkstar's website was offline and PitchBook listed the business as closed, while Oliv's site was still accepting job listings. Abid has not commented publicly on either.
A British bank, then a flight home
Public detail about Abid's early career is thin, and this profile keeps to what has been published. Sarmayacar says he worked for Banco Santander in the United Kingdom. The data service CB Insights, which lists him as Linkstar's cofounder, also records an earlier stint at Jetzy, a travel app. An independent search for this profile found no second source for either job.
His own LinkedIn profile, which was linked from a 2023 ProPakistani feature on the company, is not publicly readable, so the details of his education remain unpublished. The magazine has not been able to confirm where he studied or when he returned to Pakistan, and does not guess. A web search turns up other people named Adeel Abid, including a student and a university lecturer, and none can be tied to this founder.
What can be said is that he came home to build something with people he already trusted. Aizaz Nayyer and Ali Raza are named alongside him in every account of the company, and the three had known each other since childhood. Sarmayacar says Nayyer had held a regional marketing role at Daraz, the Alibaba owned marketplace, and that Raza came from digital agencies. Between them the three covered banking, marketing and brand work.
Savvy first, and what it taught them
Linkstar was not the founders' first attempt. In 2021 Abid, Nayyer and Raza tried a freelance marketplace called Savvy. Sarmayacar says it reached six figure dollar revenues, which is a respectable result for a first company run by three friends.
The founders used what they learned from Savvy to build Linkstar. A marketplace depends on being the middleman for every job, and that is hard to defend when freelancers and clients can simply move their conversation elsewhere. ProPakistani reported in 2023 that the company believed most freelance work happened outside marketplaces. A tool that the freelancer owns and pays for directly is a different kind of business, and the move from one to the other suggests the team understood where the first model was weak. That reading is the magazine's, not the founders' own.
Free websites and a subscription bet
Linkstar launched in January 2022. The product gave a freelancer a free website that could be upgraded to a paid digital store. Sarmayacar summed up the idea as a Shopify for freelancers and influencers, sold on subscription rather than commission, and argued that freelancers lose up to half of their earnings to marketplaces and agencies. That figure is the investor's, not an audited one.
According to the company, the paid tier added features such as international payment integration and invoicing, and the platform also offered masterclasses and freelance projects. ProPakistani's 2023 article added an e wallet for payments inside and outside Pakistan and a talent pool it put at more than 50,000. For a freelancer in Karachi or Lahore, a portfolio page that works as a shop is useful in a market where getting paid from abroad is often the harder half of the job. For the company, recurring subscription revenue is easier to forecast than commissions.
The money, as reported
In July 2022 the company said it had 15,000 users and announced pre seed funding from SOSV, Sarmayacar and K3 Diversity Ventures at a reported valuation of $5 million, according to CairoScene. The Forbes profile published in May 2024 confirms that the SOSV round closed by the end of 2022 and says the amount was never disclosed.
Those are the only funding figures in the public record apart from a small convertible note that CB Insights dates to July 2023, from Orbit Ventures and SOSV, which brings its estimate of total funding to about $210,000. There is no later round, and the user numbers have not been updated in any source this magazine could find. The valuation is a reported figure, not one the company has confirmed in a filing.
Buying a company in Dubai
In 2023 the three founders acquired Oliv, Forbes reported. Oliv connects companies with students and graduates for internships, part time work and entry level jobs. It had started life as InternsME in 2014, rebranded as Oliv in April 2018 and raised a $2 million Series A in 2019 from Saudi and Emirati backers, according to Wamda. At the time of that round Wamda said the company claimed more than 200,000 students and graduates and over 1,500 partner businesses. Those were the old owners' figures, and no price for the acquisition has been published.
The logic is not hard to see. Linkstar served freelancers who needed clients, and Oliv served young people who needed first jobs and employers who needed to find them. Both sit on the same question of how work is found in a region where hiring still leans on personal networks. Nayyer put the stakes to ProPakistani in 2023, saying youth unemployment across the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan was close to 30 percent. The purchase also moved the founders from a small Karachi startup to a Dubai business with an established brand and Gulf investors in its history.
The commercial seat
Abid appears to have taken the commercial role in the enlarged group. An October 2023 report in the Indian daily Kerala Kaumudi on Oliv's push into graduate recruitment described him as the company's chief business officer. Dealroom now lists him alongside Nayyer and Oliv's original founder Jean Michel Gauthier as part of its founding team. The magazine could not open the Kerala Kaumudi article for this profile, so the title rests on the earlier research.
A chief business officer at a recruitment marketplace has one job above the rest, which is to persuade employers to pay for access to candidates. That is the part of the business that decides whether a platform full of eager graduates becomes a company, and it is the part Abid is reported to hold. Forbes placed Abid, Nayyer and Raza on its list in May 2024, one of seven Pakistani entries that year, as Geo News counted them. It is the last significant coverage of Linkstar.
What the record leaves open
The open questions are plain. Linkstar's site is offline and PitchBook lists it as closed, but the founders have not said so, and nobody has explained what became of the users, the subscriptions or the investors' money. Oliv carries on, and Abid's connection to it is documented through a 2023 report and a database listing rather than a recent announcement.
If there is a lesson, it is that a Forbes list is a snapshot and not a verdict. The more useful test is whether a model of free tools that convert to paid ones can support a company once the first wave of users has been counted. For Abid, the next chapter appears to be in Dubai, in a business that, unlike Linkstar, still has a live website.
