In the spring of 2020, as Karachi went into lockdown, Hamza Jawaid was a management consultant at McKinsey and Company in Dubai, advising large companies on growth and digital transformation. By June he had cofounded Bazaar Technologies with Saad Jangda, a friend from middle school with whom he had shared a flat in Dubai, and closed a $1.3 million pre seed round led by Indus Valley Capital that MENAbytes reported as the largest in Pakistan's history.
Today Jawaid is the cofounder in charge of strategy at a Karachi ecommerce and financial services company that has raised more than $100 million from investors including Tiger Global, Dragoneer, Defy Partners and Wavemaker Partners. It began as a procurement marketplace for kiryana stores, added the Easy Khata digital ledger and merchant credit, and in July 2025 completed the purchase of a payments company licensed by the State Bank of Pakistan.
What makes his story worth telling is the length of the bet. Jawaid has stayed with a single, unglamorous idea, that small shops would buy and pay digitally if someone made it easy, and has kept widening it as the money arrived. He has also had to live with what widening costs.
A friend, a flat and a lockdown
The partnership is older than the company. TechCrunch reported that Jawaid and Jangda have known each other since childhood and reconnected in Dubai, where Jawaid was at McKinsey and Jangda, according to the same report, had been a product manager at Careem, the ride hailing company. One was an adviser to large clients, the other a builder of consumer apps. Between them they had a clear division of labour: Jawaid on strategy, Jangda on product.
The idea was simple to describe and hard to do. Pakistan has about five million micro, small and medium sized businesses, by TechCrunch's count, and the kiryana stores among them, the grocers on nearly every street, bought stock through a fragmented chain of wholesalers and distributors. TechCrunch put the country's retail market at about $170 billion. Bazaar would let shopkeepers order from an app, at set prices, with delivery to the door.
“We saw great potential to digitize this market and give more power to small businesses.”
A speaker profile for the MADsemble conference says Jawaid studied at the London School of Economics before McKinsey. The same profile says that under his leadership Bazaar became a Harvard Business School case study in 2022.
A seed round that noticed the smartphone
Within eight months of launch the company said it was serving more than 10,000 retailers in Karachi. In January 2021 it raised a $6.5 million seed round co led by Global Founders Capital and Indus Valley Capital, according to Profit by Pakistan Today. Jawaid's pitch rested on one observation about his customers.
“Over 80% of our customers own and operate smartphones, yet their way of running business has not changed, til now.”
The observation was modest, and it was right. The shopkeepers did not need to be taught to use a phone. They needed a reason to use it for buying stock.
Pakistan's largest Series A
A $30 million Series A followed in August 2021, led by Defy Partners of Silicon Valley and Wavemaker Partners of Singapore. TechCrunch, which reported it as the largest Series A in Pakistan, listed Acrew Capital, Saison Capital of Japan, Zayn Capital and B&Y Venture Partners among the new investors, with Indus Valley Capital, Global Founders Capital, Next Billion Ventures and Alter Global returning. Angels came from Antler, Careem, Endeavor, Gumroad, LinkedIn and Notion.
The numbers the company offered were large for a business a year old. By its own account Bazaar had signed up more than 750,000 merchants and kept 90 percent of them. The marketplace was live in Karachi and Lahore, the Easy Khata ledger was available nationwide, and a buy now, pay later product had been tested with, the company said, full repayment in early results. TechCrunch noted that the founders were not yet building consumer storefronts, because they judged the business to consumer market too immature.
Seven months, $70 million
In March 2022 Tiger Global and Dragoneer co led a $70 million Series B, which TechCrunch said took total funding past $100 million. The existing investors Indus Valley Capital, Defy Partners, Acrew Capital, Wavemaker Partners, B&Y Venture Partners and Zayn Capital took part.
TechCrunch's account of what the money was for gives the best picture of the company at its peak. It described a dozen fulfilment facilities serving merchants in 21 towns and cities, a last mile network that had grown from two cities in August 2021 and was adding three or four a month, and a target of more than 100 urban and rural centres. Easy Khata, it said, had 2.4 million registered businesses across 500 cities, with more than $10 billion in annualised transaction value recorded in the ledger. Bazaar Credit, a short term working capital loan, had issued thousands of loans in recent months.
“Everything from order generation to credit disbursement to cash collection is done completely by Bazaar.”
Beyond the kiryana
Jawaid has fronted most of the company's expansions. In February 2023 he announced Bazaar Industrial, a platform for sourcing raw materials such as chemicals, steel and polymers for manufacturers, telling Dawn the company wanted to take the lessons of its retail business into a market it put at more than $20 billion. The company said it then operated in more than 50 cities.
In August 2023 Endeavor selected him and Jangda as the first Endeavor Entrepreneurs from Pakistan, and Bazaar received capital from the Endeavor Catalyst fund.
The cost of diversifying
The expansion did not go smoothly. Profit by Pakistan Today reported that Bazaar had closed two newly launched verticals and cut about 600 staff, including its entire field force in Lahore. The paper said the cuts fell on non core teams, and that the company had spent its funding on moving into segments beyond neighbourhood stores, such as pharmaceuticals and mobile phones. Bazaar's reply, as the paper reported it, was that its core B2B retail arm supplying neighbourhood stores would keep running. The article placed Bazaar alongside other Pakistani commerce startups that retrenched in the same period, including Retailo and Dastgyr.
It is the part of the story the founders talk about least. It is also the part that makes the later strategy intelligible: a company that has learned that breadth is expensive has reason to narrow its next move to what it already does well.
From orders to payments
The biggest move came in July 2025, when Bazaar completed the purchase of Keenu, a digital payments company licensed by the State Bank of Pakistan as an electronic money institution. Profit reported that Bazaar, by then five years old, had moved into direct consumer sales in 2024, and that after the deal it connected merchants in more than 150 cities and offered mobile wallets and digital payments. Jawaid told Bloomberg the company had a very strong balance sheet, was not actively raising capital, and expected to reach profitability in the coming quarters, as reported by Nukta and Profit. No price or terms were published.
The logic is that a company which already supplies shops, tracks their sales and lends to them has a better reason than most to hold the payment itself. His stated model is an end to end commerce and payments platform in the mould of Alibaba or MercadoLibre. Profit noted the company's own reasoning that more than half of Pakistan's population is under 30, which it cited as a case for fintech.
A title nobody states
What his title is remains oddly unclear. Endeavor's profile lists him as cofounder for strategy, with Jangda on product, and no public source this magazine found names a chief executive. For a company that has raised more than any other Pakistani startup, the founders have kept the organisation chart to themselves.
What profit would prove
Jawaid has set himself a measurable test. Having said the company would reach profitability in the coming quarters, he will be judged on whether the payments business and the lending book turn a growth story into a durable one. Pakistan's small shops are still mostly cash businesses, and the question is whether they will pay Bazaar for the convenience once the discounts that attracted them are gone.
It would be a result with value well beyond the company. A profitable Bazaar would be the first large proof that venture money can build a lasting digital supply chain for Pakistani retail, and it would give the next group of founders a map.
