Most coverage of CreditBook names two founders. The husband and wife team of Hasib Malik and Iman Jamall appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2021 and gave the quotes when the company raised money. But every funding announcement, from the $1.5 million seed round in May 2021 onwards, lists a third cofounder: Hisham Adamjee.
Adamjee is, by the evidence of the public record, the least visible of the three. He is listed on CreditBook's website as cofounder and head of operations. He has given no press interviews that the magazine could find, and no quotes from him appear in coverage of either funding round.
That silence is part of the story rather than a gap in it. CreditBook began as a free ledger app for shopkeepers and has become a licensed non bank lender, and the machinery that turns the first into the second is operational work: collections, compliance, disbursement. This profile sets out what is known of the man who is listed as running it, and is plain about what is not.
The Karachi company says it has reached more than a million small businesses. Those are company figures.
A degree in supply chains and a family trust
Adamjee studied at Penn State University from 2003 to 2007, where Crunchbase records a degree in supply chain and information systems. His LinkedIn profile describes an experienced team leader with a history in private equity, food and industrial businesses, and lists him as a trustee of the Hamid Adamjee Trust since May 2010.
Crunchbase also records a directorship at Adamjee Tech Ventures and a past advisory role at the logistics startup Trukkr. The picture is of an operator from a business family who moved between industries, with a particular interest in how goods and information move. A ledger for small shops is a supply chain problem in miniature: who owes what, to whom, and when.
Three founders, one problem
According to a December 2021 account of the company's founding in We Talk Startups, Malik and Jamall met while studying at Esade Business and Law School in Barcelona, where they worked on a mass transit startup aimed at Karachi's public transport problems. They dropped it when they could not get past the transport companies, but it turned their attention to financial inclusion. Jamall, who had worked as a service designer for a bank in Pakistan, spent late 2019 surveying corner shops and unbanked businesses and found informal credit everywhere. She then brought in Malik.
Adamjee is the third name in that account. It credits him with around 15 years of experience in the sector and says he was researching the same problem when the three came together. The article does not say how he joined, and this magazine has not found a source that does.
The model that worked in India and Indonesia
His contribution, in that account, was the model. Digital ledger apps such as Khatabook and OkCredit in India, and BukuWarung in Indonesia, had shown that small shopkeepers would adopt a free app that replaced the paper account book. Adamjee proposed doing the same in Pakistan. It was not an original invention, and it did not need to be. The value of an operator in a copied model is knowing which parts of it will survive contact with local conditions.
The founders tried several designs and settled on a basic ledger with automated repayment alerts, funded the first version themselves and launched in June 2020. Shopkeepers log credit sales and the app sends reminders by SMS or WhatsApp. Profit, reporting the seed round, wrote that the platform was multilingual. MENAbytes counted six local languages and said the company claimed payment collection could be up to three times faster.
The seed round
On 4 May 2021 CreditBook announced $1.5 million in seed funding led by BitRate VC of Pakistan and VentureSouq of the United Arab Emirates, whose earlier investments include India's Khatabook. Better Tomorrow Ventures, Ratio Ventures, Quiet Capital, Toy Ventures and i2i Ventures took part, with angels from BukuWarung, Musha Ventures and Rappi. MENAbytes said the company then had a team of 15 and more than 500,000 Play Store downloads, with growth of 450 percent in six months. Profit reported close to half a million users.
The app was free and earned nothing. Malik told Profit the focus was building trust, and that weekly reminders had improved some users' cash flow by more than 50 percent, a company claim. Faisal Aftab of BitRate called the speed at which the small team shipped features incredible, and Suneel Gokhale of VentureSouq said the founders had shown they understood their customers even while bootstrapping.
“Our ultimate goal is to equip microenterprises with information to help them increase their income.”
What the title says, and what the records disagree on
The magazine uses the company's own description of his role. CreditBook's website lists Adamjee as cofounder and head of operations, alongside Malik as chief executive and Jamall as head of design. The Org gives his title as cofounder and chief operating officer since March 2020, while Tracxn calls him cofounder and managing director. Titles in startups drift, and aggregators often copy each other, so the company's page is the version used here.
Because he has given no interviews, the record of what Adamjee actually does is indirect. It is inferred from the shape of the business he is listed as running, not from anything he has said.
From a free app to a licensed lender
In December 2021 CreditBook announced an $11 million pre Series A round led by Tiger Global, its first investment in Pakistan, and by Firstminute Capital, according to Fintech Futures. TechCrunch added Banana Capital and the angels Sriram Krishnan and Julian Shapiro. Profit said the money would go on strengthening the team, adding cash flow management features and positioning the company as a financial service provider for small business owners.
Since then the company has shifted from a free app with no revenue to a licensed non bank lender, CreditBook Financial Services, run by its own chief executive, Zain Umar. The website cites a licence number from the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan dating to 2022 and calls CreditBook the only licensed digital lending company for small business financing in the country. It also offers a white label embedded finance product for other platforms.
Lending is a different discipline from ledger keeping. A ledger app can be loose about data quality because its users are shopkeepers recording their own sales. A lender has to verify borrowers, price risk, collect on time and answer to a regulator. Building the collections, compliance and disbursement machinery behind that is operations work, and it is the part of CreditBook that Adamjee is listed as running.
The engine room and what it needs
The company's website claims more than 5,000 financing instances with an 85 percent renewal rate, though a caption on the same page says more than 2,000, so the figures are unclear. Its 2025 year in review, posted on LinkedIn, claimed disbursements eight times faster than before. Those are company figures and the magazine has not been able to verify them. Speed of disbursement matters to a borrower who is waiting to buy stock, but it is also a metric a lender must balance against defaults, which the company has not published.
For Adamjee, the work means the less glamorous parts of a financial company: the people who call to collect, the compliance filings, the partnerships through which loans are funded. If CreditBook succeeds in its next phase, it will be because those functions worked quietly. If it struggles, they will be where the trouble shows first. Either way, the public will probably hear from Malik and Jamall first.
Readers should still note the third name. A company's cofounder is not always the person who speaks for it. Adamjee's own record supports a modest conclusion: that CreditBook's origin story includes a person who had been researching the same problem, who proposed the Indian ledger model, and who now runs the operations of the lender it became.
