When Forbes named the founders of Linkstar to its 30 Under 30 Asia list in May 2024, the person who spoke for the team was Ali Raza. He is a cofounder of the company, which gave freelancers a free portfolio website, and according to the data service CB Insights he is its chief operating officer. Of the three founders he is the one described as the operator.
Linkstar was launched in January 2022 on a simple observation: most freelance work is not won on marketplaces. It is won through social media and referrals, and a freelancer who looks professional online wins more of it. The company offered every freelancer a free site and sold upgrades to those who wanted a digital store that could take international payments.
Raza's story is also, in its later chapters, a story about a company that has become hard to see. By April 2025 PitchBook had marked Linkstar as out of business, and when this magazine checked in October 2026 its website returned a server error. Raza has made no public statement about what happened, and the magazine could not reach him. What follows is what the public record supports.
Agencies, a food company and a newspaper
Little is written about Raza's early career, and most of it comes from two third party sources. The investor Sarmayacar, which backed Linkstar in 2022, says he has extensive experience at digital agencies, where he managed major local and international brands. CB Insights lists his earlier employers as IO Digital, National Foods and Business Recorder, the Pakistani business newspaper.
That mix of agency work, consumer goods and publishing is a plausible grounding for a company whose product is, at heart, presentation and distribution. His LinkedIn page, which ProPakistani linked to in its 2024 coverage, is not publicly readable, and the magazine has not been able to confirm his education or his age.
Three friends and a first company
Raza, Aizaz Nayyer and Adeel Abid grew up together, according to Sarmayacar. Each brought a different background. Sarmayacar says Nayyer held a regional marketing role at Daraz, the Alibaba owned online marketplace, and that Abid had worked in the United Kingdom at Banco Santander. Raza was the agency man. ProPakistani's 2023 coverage names Nayyer as chief executive and gives no formal titles to the other two.
Their first company was Savvy, a freelance marketplace launched in 2021 that reached six figure dollar revenues, Sarmayacar says. It also taught them something, as ProPakistani reported in 2023: most freelance work was won outside marketplaces, through social media and referrals, and a product built around that fact had a better chance. Sarmayacar's summary of the pitch was blunter. Freelancers and influencers, it said, lose up to half of their earnings to marketplaces and agencies, and Linkstar offered an instant landing page for selling directly, with payment and social media integrations.
A pre seed round
In July 2022 a report on the company's pre seed round named Raza as a Linkstar cofounder, with money from SOSV, Sarmayacar and K3 Diversity Ventures. Coverage of the round put the valuation at $5 million and said the company had about 15,000 users, though the size of the cheque was not disclosed and the round was reported only by secondary outlets. Forbes later said simply that Linkstar had raised an undisclosed pre seed round from SOSV, the American venture firm, by the end of 2022.
Sarmayacar listed its own address for the company in Lahore, while Forbes and the founders' press coverage describe Linkstar as a Karachi business. The founders have not explained the difference, and it may only reflect where the investor's records were kept. Public coverage of the three has tended to speak of them as a team, and the quote further down is typical of how Raza describes it.
Matching freelancers to work
The free website was the front door. The business behind it was matching. By collecting data on each freelancer, the company said in September 2023, it could place them on projects from a talent pool of more than 50,000 and assemble remote teams for businesses in over 15 countries across five continents, with an account manager attached to larger jobs. Those are company figures, and they were never audited.
Paid upgrades, bi weekly masterclasses on subjects such as digital marketing and user experience design, and an e wallet for payments made up the rest of the offer. For an operations chief the hard part of that model is not the software. It is making sure the freelancer who is promised to a client delivers, and that the client pays, across time zones and currencies. The company's public statements say little about how well that worked.
Forbes calls
In May 2024 Forbes put all three founders on the 30 Under 30 Asia list in the consumer technology category. ProPakistani described Raza as cofounder of Linkstar and Oliv, and he told the outlet that the team was thrilled to be in such company. Pakistan Today recorded a fuller version of his reaction.
“This is a validation of the incredible work that our team has put in over the last three years. We're keeping our heads down and staying focused on our path to uplift young talent across the MENAP region.”
MENAP is a shorthand for the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. The phrase reflects a broader business than a Karachi website builder, and it followed the founders' 2023 purchase of Oliv, which Forbes reported. Oliv is a Dubai career marketplace for students and graduates. A 2019 trade report said it began as InternsME in 2014, was renamed in April 2018 and had raised $2 million in Series A money from Saudi and Emirati backers, so the founders bought a company with a longer history than their own.
Where the record thins
Since the Forbes listing the public trail has gone cold. The company raised a small convertible note from Orbit Ventures and SOSV in July 2023, according to CB Insights, which puts Linkstar's total funding at around $210,000. PitchBook then marked it out of business by April 2025. Oliv's site, by contrast, was still live in October 2026.
It is not clear whether Linkstar shut deliberately, was folded into Oliv, or simply stopped. The founders have not said, and this magazine will not guess. A closure is not unusual among startups that raise little and promise a lot, and a Forbes listing is a recognition of promise rather than a guarantee of survival.
What an operator leaves behind
For a profile of an operations chief, the missing evidence is itself a finding. Raza worked on two companies in three years, took one through a pre seed round and a small note, and helped buy a third business abroad. He did so alongside two cofounders who have been friends since childhood, and who shared the Forbes recognition.
The open questions are plain: what became of Linkstar's freelancers and its talent pool, what Oliv now does under the same founders, and what Raza intends to build next. When he speaks, it will be worth hearing what an operator learned from a company that reached Forbes before it reached scale.
